by WALL, ALAN
But mostly I would make my solitary way between Durham House Street, sheltering the unlovely backs of public buildings which aren’t much lovelier from the front, and Tower Bridge, Traitor’s Gate, the turrets and the flagpoles; the great emblem of incarceration and judicial execution so universally regarded that it now peeps decorously from a million souvenir cups and printed silken pennants. Such pretty mementoes for so much bloody terror, torture and death.
So I would walk, in the evening dusk, in the morning twilight. After a brief spell of infatuation with Jung, when the alchemical diagrams and symbols that I spent so much time gazing at came to fascinate her briefly too, Dominique had opted for Freud. For his hard-man rigour, his pitiless investigative probe. That and, I suppose, my night shifts meant we spoke to each other less and less often. In bed we sometimes collided, but seldom caressed. Our lovemaking, in any case, had by then largely degenerated into sex. We’d grown apart, in both body and mind.
We had only taken one holiday together during the previous two years, going to Rome. Even this had soon become a source of division. We walked the streets each day, often silent, riddled with our own preoccupations, but frequently hand in hand. So many temples and churches and columns and crypts. Here they wrote their history in stone. As the evening darkened, there was still a Piranesi grandeur about it all. Then one day, without even noticing where we were, we had stepped inside the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, and there before us in its gloomy corner was Bernini’s St Teresa, swooning in ecstasy at the wounds she was sharing with her redeemer; a smiling angel had arrived with the arrow of divine attention, lifting the saint’s gown, the more expertly to pierce her heart. And the look on her face bespoke an ecstasy not merely spiritual but entirely physical too. Dominique snorted.
‘It’s not difficult to see what that’s all about.’
‘No, it isn’t,’ I said quietly, more moved by the statue than I would have expected to be from the many photographs of it I had seen in books of baroque art and wishing suddenly that I was alone. ‘It’s about the oneness of the saints with Christ’s suffering. They used to call it transverberation. You could say it represents a sort of sacred transference.’ Dominique’s snort now amplified itself into a guffaw and the sound of her mockery echoed through the church’s shadowy hollows. And as we walked the streets the divisions between us, divisions we had never before spelt out with such precision, started to be defined. Freudians, however loving they may actually be, have no real place for love in their schema, as far as I can see. Everything, logically, must be reduced to appetite, to the friction of unfulfilment and the brief relapse into comfort which any climaxing relief affords. All else heads off on its labyrinthine route either towards repression or sublimation. For that is the good doctor’s teaching. And as Dominique enumerated the tenets of the doctrine to me once again, I realised how utterly repellent I found it. It wasn’t true; that wasn’t what we were. We were made of something more than mere mechanistic drives. But I knew that I risked sounding grand in trying to express the fact.
‘The desire at the core of us, of my soul and yours too, is a yearning to be reunited with divinity,’ I said as we passed the Pantheon.
‘These are foggy words, Sean. Projection…’
‘No,’ I said, interrupting her, which I did not often do. ‘No. At least I allow you to believe something, even if I disagree with it. Don’t tell me that every time I speak it’s no more than a ghost dance of projections. We’re not just a jumble of repressions, not just a set of animal appetites. There’s something sacred in here,’ – I tapped my head – ‘a little splinter of divinity. Some spark we keep catching sight of. Otherwise there’d be no poetry, no music, no painting and no sculptures of St Teresa or anyone else. That’s why, when we make love, it’s not just a physical release. It’s more than that. Or used to be.’
‘What is it then, Sean?’ Her tone was gentle and solicitous but unconvinced. Perhaps even uninterested.
‘It’s hard to express.’
‘Try anyway.’
‘I think we’re trying to get back into the sanctum sanctorum. That’s why we push so hard. Because it’s one of the routes we’ve been given to link ourselves back to all that’s sacred.’ Then I was embarrassed at the things I was saying on that foreign street, even though I believed them all and we both fell uneasily silent.
That night in our hotel I saw with utter clarity that we must either move forward in our relationship or accept that it was ending. I realised how much I didn’t want to lose her and after we had made love I asked her to marry me. I lay on my back and waited for Dominique’s response. It finally came.
‘I’ll marry you, Sean, but only if you’ll agree to do analysis. Do it properly, I mean. The real thing, not some watered-down psychotherapy. No, wait a minute. Listen to me. You’d be amazed at what you’d discover about yourself, you know. There is a dark area inside you that’s waiting for someone to map it. Something happened in that darkness a long time ago, I know it did, and you’ve buried it inside. But it won’t stay inside. It comes out as migraine and all your other strategies of self-sabotage. You’re happy with your menial job at the BBC really because something inside you doesn’t actually want you to succeed. That’s the School of Night you should be studying, not what happened four hundred years ago, but something more recent. This belief of yours that the migraines are something trying to get in and that you’ve somehow been marked out by life to solve this Elizabethan riddle – that’s an incipient psychosis, Sean. It’s the infantile will to control, that’s all. It’s the distorted expression of a reality you’ve never confronted. You make it occult inside you, then you pretend it’s something occult outside. I couldn’t believe it when you told me that you’d worked out what the migraines were; that it was the pain you felt when you resisted the information that was being offered. And it doesn’t even fit in with your religion, does it? All this astrology and alchemy you go in for: I thought they didn’t even do that stuff in the Vatican these days.’
‘It’s condemned.’
‘Then why?’
I knew it was all over now and felt I had nothing left to lose. ‘I suppose I think any tradition that continues long enough, even when the paradigm’s completely mistaken, must have gathered about itself some truths, however out of the way they may seem.’
‘So even Freudianism might qualify then?’ She was yawning, pulling the sheets up to her chin, getting ready to sleep.
‘Maybe. But not yet.’
‘A century’s not long enough?’
‘Not this last one. And they never look any better, anyway.’
‘Who don’t?’
‘The halt and the lame who come to your door. They never look any better to me, Dominique.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Your clients. I’ve seen some of those faces year in, year out. They look just as grim now as when they first arrived.’
‘It can take a long time, untying a knot.’
‘Maybe. But you’d expect them to look at least a bit more unknotted by this stage.’
‘Are you saying I’m not a good analyst, Sean?’
‘No. I’m sure you’re one of the best. I’m just saying – what am I saying? I’m probably quoting my old history teacher, Mr Crawley, that’s all: maybe the paradigm’s mistaken. Maybe the process itself is misconceived. Maybe you’re just looking in the wrong places for the wrong things.’
‘Good night.’
And we were never to speak of such matters again.
* * *
So I suppose I wasn’t really in much of a position to complain when, back in London, I arrived home unexpectedly in the middle of the night (migraine, never take it for granted) and found her in bed with her colleague from the Tavistock, Dr Emmanuel, author of Anxiety and Modern Life. I’d had dinner with him and Dominique a number of times and had felt then that not one but two people were now taking mental notes regarding my repressions. They had discussed the twisted
psyches of everyone they knew with a mutual glee only barely masquerading as professional detachment.
I had come up the steps and let myself into the room with hardly a sound – creatures of darkness learn to tread softly. And now, while he made his exit and they whispered to each other out on the stairs, words I couldn’t make out, I found myself staring at the scarred wooden table in our kitchen. On it lay the remnants of the noodles they must have eaten the evening before, their congealed torsos tangled one over another in the ruins of that takeaway meal. Thirty minutes later, in bed exhausted with my eyes closed, those little yellow bodies were still making their slow progress across the room and into my mind. I suppose they entered finally as the migraine faded and sleep’s door opened me up to the true, the universal darkness.
4
We had never gone to visit my father on the inside. The subject was simply avoided. Sometimes a letter would arrive and I knew by the sinister black markings on the envelope who it was from. I would sneak it out of the sideboard drawer once I was alone in the room. There it was again, the illiterate quiver of his handwriting, with the prison number stamped at the top. And I only hoap young Sean iss grwoing up beter than hiss Dad. My old man’s spelling left as much to be desired as his thieving.
This might account for my own obsessively tidy hand, my tiny, regular characters and my horror of misspelling. A mistake on a page can stop me reading for a moment; two or three will make me throw the text away. An expanse of print sufficiently littered with errors makes me nauseous. This had intrigued Dominique. She thought it connected up in some occult manner with my migraines. Dominique. Anyway, let’s say I am acutely aware of the patternings of script and orthography, which was why, the first time I ever set eyes on some of Hariot’s papers, I was beguiled. A variant of the secretary hand, it is curiously linked and graced by unexpected devices, which seem almost to be characters in themselves, secret figures from a cabbalistic alphabet. Geometric shapes flourish in unexpected margins. Euclidean segments intervene between one hurried thought and the next. Planets and their dispositions break into the middle of a sentence. But only in these last two weeks have I realised that he also wrote in code. I am pleased that he did. It means that things I knew to be true might now be proven. Except, of course, that I can’t tell anyone else about them without going to prison. There is a certain pleasure in the knowledge that prison was where Hariot wrote most of what lies on the table before me. It was also where my father was on the day I was born. Such hidden symmetries.
Coded writing. Secret societies. It seems at last that my eccentric studies are coming together. Anyone would think I had been meant to arrive here and sit in the darkness with my stolen books. You couldn’t really have planned all this, could you, Dan?
Dominique had wanted me out sooner than I’d expected. I daresay it was difficult for her to continue romancing Dr Emmanuel at his place, with his wife and two children already in situ. I didn’t argue; she would have known I wouldn’t. She had, after all, made a study of what she called my providential superstition: my refusal to push against the river, my belief that what was given could not be rejected, that nothing was ever accidental. To think so is the capital sin against time. I once pointed out to her that she herself held a similar belief, however unacknowledged, since Freudians also reject the accident as too slipshod and unworthy a basis for explanation. They also are committed to the belief that every event, however apparently casual it may seem, is in truth freighted with lifelong significance, buried deep inside the wounds of time. Otherwise their diagnostic technique collapses.
She merely kept a weather eye on any rogue migraines, but she was evidently not minded to reconsider my removal from her life. I’d never had anything to do with the arrangements about where we lived. It was all done through friends of Dominique’s family and I merely paid my portion of the monthly rent. So I went quietly. And there was only one place I could think of going: to Stefan Kreuz’s flat.
I hadn’t made many friends in London, in fact I suppose I had made one: Stefan, though I do wonder if friends is really the right word for what we were. I seem to remember once hearing someone define a friend as a person whom you’d not change, even if you could, since you’ve come to love their faults as much as their virtues, but Stefan and I didn’t really know each other’s faults. Not yet anyway. So, it was to him that I turned for accommodation.
He was one of the exotics who thronged the World Service. He seemed to be in his mid-fifties, though with a mane of silky white hair that could have made him look older. He had left his native Hungary in 1956 when the Russian tanks rolled in. In the years since he had acquired a ventriloquist’s facility for speaking every European language with a pronounced, but engaging, accent. And he had become a translator of repute. He had produced the definitive Hungarian versions of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, Apollinaire’s Alcools and Shakespeare’s Sonnets. He was deputy head of the Hungarian section. It was not a hard-and-fast rule, more an unwritten convention, that those whose first language was not English did not become head of any section. This had the curious result that many deputy heads were considerably more distinguished than their superiors and knew it. He had first come to my attention when he made a programme at Bush House called Translating Shakespeare.
Immediately after hearing it I had sought him out. We had sat downstairs in the bar, with the enormous aquarium full of luminous fish before us.
‘Shakespeare is not translatable, as a matter of fact,’ he had said, in answer to a query of mine.
‘But you translated him.’ Stefan considered this for a moment as I watched the fish describe invisible diagrams of great complexity.
‘I think my translation was actually designed to point up his untranslatability.’ Here he murmured some beautiful sounds in what I assumed was Hungarian.
‘What’s that?’
“‘Therefore I lie with her, and she with me, And in our faults by lies we flattered be.” From my translation of the Sonnets. That explains, rather beautifully I think, that no truth is translatable elsewhere – it can only flourish when connected with its own specific need. What I mean is, Shakespeare sounds out every register. It’s unnerving enough even for the most attentive reader, but for a translator it’s truly alarming. It’s as though he can inhabit the language at any point without effort, as though the heavy gravitational pull that constitutes our very relation to speech and writing doesn’t apply. It’s eerie. I imagine this is what Wittgenstein meant when he insisted that Shakespeare wasn’t a Dichter, though it’s possible he’d only ever read the Schlegel-Tieck text.
‘Of course it must have had something to do with English at that moment in its history – one new world achieved and another waiting at the door. Do you know what Yves Bonnefoy said in the afterword to his translation of Hamlet? That the English language is Aristotelian, all surface and practicality, while the French is Platonic, all depth and quintessential form.’
‘Do you think that’s true?’ I asked, puzzled.
‘No, but I think it’s very French. They do love their binary oppositions. There’s something spiritually amoeboid about a Frenchman: nothing ever seems to give him as much pleasure as splitting his little world in two.’
I soon realised that Stefan thrived on the company of younger people. He seemed to need the current of their energy about him. I think he fed upon it. Smoking his Gauloises, sipping his cognacs, or adapting the indigenous coffee to his requirements with the aid of the chicory beans he kept in one pocket and the tiny grinder he kept in the other, he would discourse fluently upon whatever subject he had alighted. I had spent many evenings at his enormous, book-filled, slightly dusty flat overlooking Museum Street, drinking into the early hours. Sometimes our talks went on so long that I would have had to walk back home.
‘Sleep here,’ he would say easily, if the weather was really bad. ‘There is a spare room with a bed made up.’ And so I had slept in it from time to time. Only for the night though. Now I was asking for som
ething considerably more substantial in the way of hospitality.
‘I was wondering if it might be possible for me to stay for a while.’
‘A while,’ Stefan repeated, his inflexion managing somehow to turn the words into a query, as he pondered the chronological elasticity of the phrase.
‘I work most nights,’ I said, trying to put my finger on some advantages of life in my company. ‘Reading’s normally the noisiest thing I do. I sometimes get migraines, you see. If I’m particularly happy, I’ve been known to sing. But I doubt there’s much chance of that just at the moment.’
‘What do you sing?’
‘Old Bessie Smith songs.’
‘The blues?’
‘The blues.’
‘But only when you’re happy.’
‘Yes. Otherwise I don’t sing at all. These days mostly I don’t sing at all.’
‘Would you like a cognac?’
‘Yes please.’
He came back from the kitchen with his mind made up. He handed me my drink.
‘You may stay here for a while, as long as we both understand that it is for me to define precisely how long a while is. I’m sure that I shall often be glad of your company, Sean. There are, however, times when I shan’t. And then, my friend – and I mean this in the nicest possible way – you must make yourself scarce. No arguments. No excuses. The notice given may be rather short.’
I shrugged in compliance.
‘When I entertain a lady here you must contrive to be elsewhere. Whenever two people are in a state of intimacy, any others are, to my mind anyway, de trop, whatever the barbaric modern practices of multiple fornication. One must know that the little cries and murmurs are for one’s own ears. No one else’s.’