There is another world, and I have seen parts of that world on most days of my life. But the parts of that world are drifting past and cannot be lived in. For as long as I used to see drifting past me those parts of the other world, I used to wonder about the place where all the drifting parts drifted together. But I no longer wondered after I had read the words attached to the name Paul Eluard.
There is another world but it is in this one...So say the words printed among the preliminary pages of one of the books that I have never read. But what place exactly do the words this one refer to? They cannot refer to the space between the covers of the book where I found them. I have never yet found a book whose preliminary pages and whose inner pages belong together. And in any case, the name of the author on the front of my book is not Paul Eluard but Patrick White. The words this one can only refer to the so-called world between the covers of a book I have never seen: a book whose author is a man named Paul Eluard.
Perhaps those words from Paul Eluard first appeared in the preliminary pages of a book of his. But I repeat: I have never found any book whose preliminary pages belonged with its inner pages, which means that the other world is within drifting pages that I will almost certainly never see: pages in a dream-book that I can only dream of.
On the other hand, the words of Paul Eluard might have first appeared on the inner pages of one of his books. In that case, I have to understand the words somewhat differently. If the words were in the inner pages of a book, they can only have been uttered by a narrator or a character – by one of those people who inhabit the inner pages of books. There is another world, says one of those people deep inside the pages of a book, but it is in – and therefore at one remove further from you out there – this world where I am now.
The other world, in other words, is a place that can only be seen or dreamed of by those people known to us as narrators of books or characters within books. If you or I, reader, happen to glimpse part of that world drifting past, as it were, it is because we have seen or dreamed of ourselves seeing for a moment as a narrator or a character in a book sees or dreams of seeing.
If someone reading this page is thinking of Paul Eluard as a living man uttering his words in the place that is usually called the real world and referring perhaps to something as simple as a world he has dreamed of or the world in which the characters in books lead their so-called lives, then I can only answer that if a man named Paul Eluard walked into this room tonight and uttered his mysterious words, I would understand Mr Eluard as my reader wants to understand him. But until Paul Eluard comes into my room I have only a copy of his written words. He wrote his words and at the instant of his writing them the words entered the world of narrators and characters and landscapes – not to mention pages that drift into other books where they might be read by people such as myself.
But what if Paul Eluard wrote no book? What if the only words he wrote in all his life are the ten mysterious words, which he wrote only once on a blank page before setting the page adrift? There is another world but it is in this one...Even then, the words are still written. However, in this case the other world must be understood as lying within the virgin whiteness which is all that part of the page where, as yet, no word has been written.
In desks one in front of the other, in the senior classroom of the Catholic primary school on a low hilltop east of the valley of the Moonee Ponds, while a wind drove rain-clouds from the grasslands west of Melbourne County over my native district, I sat with the girl from Bendigo Street and a girl from Bendigo.
The girl from Bendigo Street had arrived in my district from East Melbourne in the first week of February. Two weeks later a family that included three children had arrived in my district from the city of Bendigo, and the girl from that family had come to sit in the class that included myself and the girl from Bendigo Street.
Even if I had not already chosen the girl from Bendigo Street, I would not have been interested in the girl from Bendigo as a girlfriend. But I looked into her face on every hot afternoon in the last weeks of that summer. And while I looked into her face I looked from the sides of my eyes at the tops of the elm trees in Raeburn Reserve.
Three years before, the girl from Bendigo had sat near me in a classroom from the windows of which I had seen the tops of a row of elm trees in McCrae Street, Bendigo. In the same year, on hot afternoons in December, the girl and I had been among the children who walked in file beneath the elm trees in Rosalind Park on our way to practise for our Christmas concert in the Capitol Theatre in View Street. In the classroom in my native district I was enjoying what has been the chief pleasure of my life, which is to see two places I had thought far apart lying in fact in one place – not simply adjoining one another but each appearing to enclose or even to embody the other.
I had lived in the district between Bendigo Creek and Huntly Race for longer than I had lived anywhere during my childhood. I had thought while I lived there that the district between Bendigo Creek and Huntly Race would be for me what a native district is for many other people. But I had been taken away from that district and from the city of Bendigo when I was nine years old, and I had not seen those places since. Before the girl from Bendigo had arrived in my native district I had sometimes looked at the elm trees in Raeburn Reserve, but while I looked I had not thought I was looking at some part of the city of Bendigo. Yet when I looked at the face of the girl from Bendigo in my classroom so that I saw the elm trees in Raeburn Reserve only from the sides of my eyes, then I saw that the elm trees were the trees of McCrae Street, Bendigo. And I even saw, without taking my eyes away from the face of the girl from Bendigo, the elm trees further along McCrae Street towards the corner of Baxter Street, and the elm trees around the corner in Baxter Street where I would walk that afternoon on my way from my school to my home in the district between Bendigo Creek and Huntly Race.
Perhaps someone reading this page believes I should not have written that a family with three children moved from a district of Bendigo to the one district of all the districts of Melbourne County where a boy who often remembered a city named Bendigo had chosen for his girlfriend a girl who lived in a street named Bendigo. That reader would probably believe also that I should not write that the girl from Bendigo became friendly with the girl from Bendigo Street, so much so that on a day of heavy rain when the classroom happened to be almost empty and the children in the room were free to sit where they pleased, the girl from Bendigo Street sat with the girl from Bendigo while I sat near both of them, turning often to say to the girl from Bendigo what I wanted to say to the girl from Bendigo Street and what the girl from Bendigo Street could hear clearly although she kept her head down and showed no sign of having heard.
Anyone who believes I should not have written what I have written does not understand what a man named Eluard once wrote on the inner pages of a book or on an otherwise blank page that he later set adrift. Such a reader does not understand that each place has another place within it.
Such a reader does not trust the words of the man named Eluard as I trust them. And I trust the words to this extent: that if it were not by definition impossible for me to tell my reader where I am at this moment, I would write on this page that I am at this moment in another world but that the world where I am is in this one.
Each of us – the girl from Bendigo Street and myself – told the other through the girl from Bendigo all the faults we had found in one another: all our reasons for disliking one another. Each of us spoke just loudly enough for the other to hear the words above the murmuring of the few children in the room and the beating of the rain against the windows. And although the girl from Bendigo knew that the girl from Bendigo Street and I heard one another, she acted faithfully as our go-between and passed on our messages as though we were far apart.
We hardly looked at one another. The girl from Bendigo Street kept her head down over her schoolbook and I looked mostly at the rain and the grey sky. I saw the yellow of her hair only from the sides o
f my eyes.
Our game of complaining against one another did not seem tedious to me. It seemed a game of almost boundless promise. The more we found fault with one another and pressed down on the one side of the balance, the more we seemed to promise one another that a heavy counterweight would later be placed on the other side.
The girl from Bendigo Street guided me towards the end of our game. She suggested to me – still through the girl from Bendigo – that I who found so many faults in her would surely find fault with most other girls.
I saw where she was leading me. I told her that I did find fault with most girls.
In that case, it was suggested to me, I would surely not have chosen a girlfriend for myself.
She could believe me or not, she was told, but I had chosen a girlfriend six months before.
So we went on. My girlfriend would have been this sort of person or that sort. She would have lived far away in this or that place. She had surely never set foot in the district between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri...
Our game still seemed endlessly promising. We might have gone on playing it for day after day, I thought. I might have talked about fanciful versions of myself, each with a girlfriend in a district far from my native district, and I might have said about those fanciful people what I could never have said about myself and the girl I was talking to.
But the girl from Bendigo Street asked in good time the question whose answer she could hardly have doubted. And writing this today I admire her sense of decorum. Of the two words commonly used by children at our school when they talked about girlfriends and boyfriends, she chose not the word from the hit parade songs that we both knew well: not the word that belonged with outlines of hearts pierced by arrows. She chose instead the more discreet word. She chose the word that we might have used to one another’s face without being embarrassed and without feeling as though we were only children playing at being adults.
I had told the girl from Bendigo Street through the girl from Bendigo that my girlfriend in fact lived between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri. The question was then put to me: if I liked a girl from that district, who did I like?
I wonder whether or not I spoke my answer. I wonder whether I said to the girl from Bendigo the words I like her. And I wonder whether I stressed the last of those three words heavily and whether I stared while I spoke the words at the bowed head of the girl from Bendigo Street so that she could hear fully the sound of every letter of every word.
I cannot remember. I suspect that I simply pointed at the bowed head and that the girl from Bendigo then whispered my meaning to the girl from Bendigo Street, in which case the girl from Bendigo Street did not hear the sound of my voice. I suspect I had begun to feel already the arrogance that came over me many years later on the very few occasions when I seemed to have another person in my power. But if I simply pointed my finger, and if my pointing was in any way arrogant, yet I can remember at least that the head with the yellow hair remained bowed: the girl from Bendigo Street could not have seen me.
If I did not speak – and if the girl from Bendigo Street did not hear me say what I felt towards her on that rainy afternoon nearly forty years ago – then I offer to that girl the words I am about to write on this page.
Even if I had spoken to the girl from Bendigo in the hearing of the girl from Bendigo Street, I would have used the more cautious word – the word that the girl from Bendigo Street, with her faultless girl-woman’s tact, had put in my way. I would have said I like her. But by now enough time has passed, I think, for me to use the bolder word. Today I write I love her.
The words I have just written are written as though to a go-between. But a man who writes on pages such as these can only have for his go-between his reader. If I could think of my reader as a man or a woman in a room with a window looking towards Mount Macedon across the last traces of the grasslands north of Melbourne County, then I could suppose at least that my message will fall into the hands of someone who remembers the district between the Moonee Ponds and the Merri as it was in the early years of the 1950s and remembers a street named Bendigo where the water lay in long puddles all through the winter and remembers a girl who lived in that street.
But anyone who writes on pages such as these can only have for his reader someone in the Calvin O. Dahlberg Institute – and not even some woman who touches rows of buttons and who stares into cloudy glass, but some man like the writer himself: a man among the least-frequented corridors and in one of the least-visited rooms.
In her own message to me the girl from Bendigo Street outdid me. After I had spoken or nodded or pointed, I had turned to the window and waited for an answer. I was not uneasy. In the months while we had known one another the girl from Bendigo Street had been teaching me – whether she knew it or not – the language of girl-women, and well before the rainy afternoon I had translated some of what she had told me into my own language.
The answer came to me promptly. The girl from Bendigo looked at me and said the words She says she likes you very much.
I was only a child of not quite thirteen years who thought he knew as much and felt as strongly as any boy or girl of his age in any country of the world, but I heard in the sound of the last two words spoken by the girl from Bendigo something that surprised me. It was something that the girl from Bendigo too must have heard in the sound of the same two words when the girl from Bendigo Street had spoken them to her so softly that I had not heard any words from where I was sitting. The girl from Bendigo had spoken the first five of her words softly and then she had paused for part of a moment. She had paused for just long enough so that whenever I have dreamed of myself hearing her words since that day, I have heard as clearly as though it was a word itself the silence that came before her last two words.
When I hear the silence that comes between my own words sometimes, I think of prairies or plains – as though all my words are being spoken from grasslands. But whenever I hear the silence that comes between the first five and the last two of the seven words spoken to me by the girl from Bendigo, I think of depths.
I did not hear the words whispered by the girl from Bendigo Street, but I understand that they must have comprised a sentence with a main clause whose verb was in the imperative mood followed by a noun clause whose verb was a part of the verb to like in the present tense, indicative mood. If such a sentence was spoken to me, and if I obeyed the command in the main clause, I would report to the person denoted by the pronoun which was the object of the verb in the main clause a sentence beginning with a main clause whose verb was in the past historic tense. If I had been the girl from Bendigo on that rainy afternoon I would have used the past historic tense of the verb to say in the sentence that I spoke to the boy who was myself on that day. But my writing this only shows how little I know of the language of girl-women. The girl from Bendigo understood perfectly the words of the girl from Bendigo Street. The girl from Bendigo reported all that was stated and implied in the words that she heard from the girl from Bendigo Street. Those words were in the language of girl-women, and that language includes a tense which appears identical to the present tense in my language but which denotes an action that can never have been brought to an end.
At some time during the years after that rainy afternoon, a new church and a new school, each of brick, were built in the paddock next to the church-school where I sat with the girl from Bendigo and the girl from Bendigo Street. The old building was later destroyed by fire, if I have remembered accurately something that one of my brothers wrote to me in a letter. Whenever I have written about the building that I knew on the slight hill in Landells Road, I have used the past historic tense: the simple tense prescribed by my language for actions completed in the past. But whenever I have thought of writing a sentence with verbs of that tense to report the words spoken to me by the girl from Bendigo, which words in turn were to report to me the words whispered by the girl from Bendigo Street, I have been unable to translate the verbs used by either gi
rl from their original tense in the language of girl-women. I have never been able to write that the actions denoted by the whispered verbs have been brought to an end. Much else has been brought to an end, but those words remain untranslatable.
In the spring of the year when I was twelve, in the last weeks of the season after Pentecost, whenever the afternoon was warm I leaned against the lower branches of a fig-tree and prepared myself for the end of the summer that had not even begun.
Four months from then, in the hot days of February, I would have been wearing the uniform of a boys’ secondary school and travelling each day to my new school by tram. At the same time my girlfriend, the girl from Bendigo Street, would have put on the uniform of a girls’ secondary school and would have begun, too, to travel – but on a different tram. We would no longer see each other every day. For most of the week we would be in opposite corners of our district. And yet our lives would be more crowded than before with events that we wanted to describe to one another.
I had planned easily how my girlfriend and I would meet one another four or five years from then, when we were old enough to go together on the evening bus to the cinemas in the main street of our district. I had planned even more easily that we would marry four or five years afterwards and live in a large house on the other side of Mount Macedon where I would train racehorses and she would breed pedigreed golden cocker spaniels. But all I could devise for us in the summer to come was her calling at my house sometimes on her way from the tram terminus to her own home. She would call at my house to pat my dog Belle, who met her own dog sometimes when I walked with Belle along Sims Street at the edge of the grasslands. Or the girl from Bendigo Street would call at my own house sometimes to sit beside the fish pond.
Without the fish pond, I thought, I could not have invited my girlfriend to my home. It would have seemed a drab invitation to a girl-woman to ask her into an unremarkable backyard. But the pond distinguished my backyard; and when my girlfriend and I sat beside the pond – even if we sat on the wired-together wooden chairs from my kitchen and drank cordial and water from the glasses that had once held cheese spread or lemon butter – the pond would have made us feel older and more elegant.
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