I Hear Voices

by Paul Ableman

  Neither of the other two say anything. Gore takes some newly acquired filigree from his pocket and inspects it for flaws.

  “It doesn’t really feel like the center of affairs,” I say again, but somewhat uncomfortably, feeling that there may be something in the aspect or atmosphere of the place that betrays it as being unmistakably the center of affairs and that the other two are silently and contemptuously deriding my ignorance.

  “No, it doesn’t really,” agrees, to my relief, the Commissioner at last. “It’s one of my great banes. I often arrive here in the morning, after having been driven here slowly through the foam, and, as I enter, not this little, quaint retreat, but the hive above, with its frieze of guards, with its important elements in continual flux, a troubling, mischievous voice says: ‘Do you really believe this to be the center of affairs? This?’ I round on it sharply. ‘Certainly,’ I say, in my official tones which are still rich and resonant enough to accommodate far more than conventional ranges of feeling. ‘Certainly,’ I say. ‘I’m convinced of it. Oh, I realize full well, malicious voice, the sort of doubts you’re striving to ignite. Presumption, arrogance—you’re playing on the built-in regulator. I have one, too, naturally, but still I think that this is definitely the center of affairs and I also think it is the crest of the wave. This room, for example, carved like eggs and cherries. Less visibly, there are meters and dials and these romp away to any picnic so that I can feel the floating moment anywhere. This must be the very center of affairs. ‘Carved like this?’ asks the voice. ‘Like eggs and cherry pips?’ I can then, of course, afford to smile. ‘You betray yourself,’ I deride the voice. ‘You reveal how sentimental and superficial your standards are. You think the center of affairs should have some special, perhaps noble, imposing, exalted, physical appearance? Why not cherry pips and eggs? The center of affairs is not in them, any more than it would be in the pavilions, towers and marble halls if I had ostentatiously elected to have those. No the center of affairs is—’ But at that point I always break down, even as my finger rises to indicate my temple, and at that point the voice disappears and leaves me to ponder. This all takes place, you realize, in the few steps between nodding an absent salute to the guard and being hailed by the first subordinate with despatches a distance of some twenty feet, three or four seconds, and then I am, beyond controversy, at some sort of center, maneuvering, thinking, assured of my key position by the lock that surrounds me. It is only at moments like these, when there is a lull and a visitor like you comes in and raises the matter, that I revert to my morning problem. What do I want to do with that finger? Point to my forehead and say ‘there, there’s the real center of affairs.’ I feel grave doubts about that.”

  Just then, news comes that the whole pot has toppled.

  “We’re still putting the report together,” announces the crisp young subordinate, “correlating it, but there can be little doubt of its authenticity.”

  After he has left, the Commissioner reassures us.

  “A false report. The pot has not toppled. It’s toppling, of course, but then it always is. That was Badger, who’s an excellent man but inexperienced: I know that the pot hasn’t toppled.”

  It turns out, however, that the pot has toppled and Badger assumes new and more elevated office. Brangwill is hoisted from the center of affairs and relegated to a dust trap. Gore is enormously amused by the whole thing but also bitter and contemptuous.

  “Come on,” he mutters fiercely. “I’ll take you to some of the resultant scenes. These scenes are all connected with what has occurred.”

  Later, however, I can not help feeling that Gore’s basic desires, which are for voluptuous and literary pleasure, have, perhaps without his conscious consent or even knowledge, triumphed over his averred intention, for the first scene he shows me does not seem to be in any way connected with what recently took place at the center of affairs.

  “Here we are,” he says. “Velvet. Keep a sharp eye out. I’ll do some epigrams in a minute. Fine place, what?”

  The fragrant grasses send up a steam of rich narcotic fumes. The lovely girls, courtesans of all races, feed the drugged flames with grasses from their meager apparel. Thus, as the narcotic vapors coil more densely through the turret, the frustrated eye finds more, but in increasingly obscure and infrequent glimpses, of the persons of these lovely girls available for inspection.

  “Lovely place,” enthuses Gore. “Compare this with the thin-lipped rewards of other places. First epigram. Compare it with anything. Second. Nothing like it.”

  “But,” I begin, rather apologetically, “I thought these scenes—”

  “So they are,” snaps Gore irritably. “Connected. Loosely connected. You’ll see how in a little while and anyway we won’t be here long and then we’ll go on to other, and perhaps more directly connected scenes— mass rejoicing, re-deployment, despair and so forth. One at a time.”

  I realize now that much of Gore’s hatred for his uncle is really converted admiration. I explain this mechanism to Gore and he is hugely diverted. Then he frowns.

  “The trouble is,” he protests, “if I dissipate that, won’t some new mechanism start up? I mean, do you think one can manage without mechanisms?”

  I try to continue the discussion but Gore is by now too intent on the voluptuous rites that are taking place to do other than murmur a dismissive “yes, yes” as I elaborate the argument. A little later, during a lull, he does look at me on the thrust of a recollection and says “poor old uncle,” doubtless having suddenly glimpsed the burdened Commissioner in some simple human situation, forgotten until that instant, in a garden or room. Later, however, he gets terribly embarrassed and insists that we leave as rapidly and inconspicuously as possible.

  When we have turned a few corners, he tries to convince me that something relevant to the changeover at the center of affairs did take place and that I missed it.

  “Anyway,” he goes on, “even if we admit that it was only inessential, even peripheral, nothing has been lost, for now is a better and riper time for the remainder of the consequential scenes we have to visit.”

  He tells me what some of these scenes are to be, explaining their psychological and other forms of relevance, but, when we get to the next one, it is not easy to detect the elements he predicted. This scene is an old friend of his called Carl, blowing his nose near some railings. For a few moments, Carl, occupied with his handkerchief, can not reply to Gore’s gibes without risking a messy solecism. Nevertheless, he is apparently so incensed either by what Gore is saying or by some latent aggravation, that he does finally risk mucous disaster.

  “The reason,” he bubbles indignantly, after Gore has ironically expressed surprise at finding him away from his quarters while suffering from a severe cold, “is your bloody forgetfulness.”

  He hastily reapplies, having established this conversational foothold, the handkerchief to his nose, thoroughly, if rapidly, completes the sanitary operation and then resumes:

  “You forgot to send me that—”

  At this point a thundering object bears down on us and a rapid series of events, including a half-cry from a passing gypsy, some squealing and crashing and finally the feeling of heavy bodies having reached, from a state of violent, ungoverned motion, miraculous, renewed equilibrium, follows.

  Carl, perhaps somewhat insulated by his cold from the full violence of life, is the first to recover.

  “That missed everyone,” he announces, peering to see if, in fact, contours and bodies are still roughly the same. It now seems, however, that he has not substantially escaped being influenced by these kinetic events for he begins to ask hysterically what Gore has done about Dolly.

  “Where’s Dolly?”

  “What?” asks Gore absently, listening to the admonitions and inquiries that are beginning to break out. “They ought to—”

  “Dolly—Dolly—”

  “That gypsy woman’s hurt,” I point out.

  “Dolly—” but now Carl sees th
e crumpled figure and at once says, “I know her.”

  He moves a pace towards the woman, blows his nose, and then, obviously torn between claims of different sorts, turns back to Gore and says: “Just don’t forget to send me—”

  But now some movement of the fallen woman, who is intermittently visible through a straggle of gatherers, claims his attention decisively. I see now that this woman is not a gypsy but a middle-class intellectual, with a very white face, bleeding to death. Carl moves over to her but the appropriate officials are already on the spot, and a doctor too. In a moment, Carl returns to us and informs us that the woman is his landlady, that she has been “bloody helpful” and that he must go with her.

  “That chap,” he says, nodding towards the doctor, “says she’s not too bad. God, she’s bleeding though.”

  He looks once more, sharply, at Gore who is looking vacantly at some glowing words, trying, I can not help feeling, to read poetry into them. These words say “Dinners, Teas” and do not seem a very promising basis but, in my acquaintance with Gore, I have noticed that he often responds to violent intrusions by searching for some poetry and that he is apt to make the most, on these occasions, of whatever offers. Now he takes his eyes from the sign, looks at Carl and asks if there is anything he can do.

  “Yes, just remember—” Carl begins, but then abandons whatever it was he intended. “Oh, it’s all right—”

  And he returns to the scene of the accident. Gore and I depart and later Gore informs me:

  “You’ve met Carl before,” and then explains, “I’ve known him on and off for years. You met him in the cavern.”

  “And Dolly?” I ask.

  But Gore shakes his head impatiently.

  “We’d better hurry,” he urges, “the meeting starts in a few minutes.”

  We sweep along, past icons, and at some time Gore, who must have been nagged by a reiteration of my last question, informs me that Dolly was “one of those damned women at that place.”

  The damned woman has done this and that to his life and “not really,” snarls Gore, ostensibly to himself, and possibly actually to himself, but still with awareness of an audience registered in the modulation, “not really, my—métier—something—” We sweep along, past teeth and circuits, nodding at the condensers and amused by intrusive elements whose modifications of existing patterns Gore makes clear to me.

  At the meeting, Gore snarls viciously whenever a point is raised criticizing or attacking his Uncle Brangwill. These snarls are intended both to encourage the critic and also to dramatize the savagery and vicious, cynical opportunism of the deposed Commissioner. Gore, in fact, gets so excited at one point that I remind him of the mechanism, but he seems to have passed beyond the sphere of operation of the mechanism and to be representing no attitude that could be derived from the collisions of mere human beings but simply the fury of primal instability.

  Later he seems glazed and deflected, and, when I catch up with him near some fruit, he tries to explain gently and truthfully about this false métier.

  “I should be such and such—have been—if I hadn’t—”

  But the tendrils of the night are waving affectionately. These tendrils stem from a façade that glares with emerald and silver lights. Gore begins to shake his head and to look around, trying to pluck the tendrils from his ears where they have wound themselves in steel-strong bands of muttering temptation. He seeks to remain long enough to set me on the right road. He derides the Commissioner. And then, his restraint bursting suddenly, he whistles away back to Dolly, swearing that he must have “a word—a word with her—and then—”

  And I return to my egg.

  At once everything sinks away, the Commissioner, Gore, the part I have been playing in events, and I find myself sitting up in bed, hunched forward slightly over a cracked tray, alone and forgotten in a small room. Susan comes to the top of the stairs outside my room and remarks to some relative or female visitor.

  “No, he’s no better. No, he never gets up—well, I do my best and take him his meals and such like but I don’t know how long—”

  And the female visitor says, “Terrible. Terrible thing for you—yes —”

  And then they go down again.

  With a great effort I uncap my egg and listen for the sound of hunger. My stomach says, “You are hungry. You may eat,” but a moment later it contradicts itself and says, “Why should you eat? Why should you eat their food? They produced it. It’s the result of their unpleasant behavior. Why should you eat their food?”

  “Why should he eat their food?”

  “Why should he obey their voices?”

  “He is narrow today.”

  “Doing nicely.”

  I shake my head unhappily, angry with the voices for telling me no more than I have realized already. I am also angry with them for trying to make me see too much at once. They never help me. They only criticize. No, they don’t criticize. What they really want is to make everything impossible, everything equally impossible. They’ve driven me here and they still drive me, although they’ve already forbidden all possible destinations. Demon voices! Devil voices! What do you want of me?

  “We want you to sing.”

  “We want you to make a good job of it.”

  What, for example, do they want me to do with my eyes? Do they want me to see what I now see? I see a blur of shadow and objects and a bright slit between the curtains. Do they want me to see this room? Do they want me to see it only shadowy and dark as it now is? Or would they rather I saw it flooded with light? And will they stick up an August sun and melt the curtains so that I can see it radiant with light? And when I’ve seen it this way or that brighter way, do they want me to stay in it, or shut my eyes and seal in that dullness or brightness forever? Or do they want me to go out, one way, left or right, and see what next comes? And do they want me to see it the way it comes or some special way? Which way? Only concerning my eyes now, only vision, voices, which way must I see?

  “He must go on looking, isn’t that right?”

  “I think that’s quite right.”

  What is right? Voices? What is right?

  But the voices have gone back into their box. I realize this quite clearly, and am on the whole more pleased than sorry. I look out through the slit of light and see part of a house and the ancient sky. Very little of the sky, at least from side to side, is visible and my human eyes do not penetrate very far. I am now quite alone in an alien room with only a morsel of house and sky. Each man is a prince attended by innumerable servants called molecules. But none of my attendants is here. Each man is a bladder of fire scraping through pumice stone.

  I ask Radcliffe, the last of my molecules, to bring me a model and he brings me a model of a world. It is too large to be held conveniently and so he sets it on a stand in front of me. I look at it without interest at first and then, peering closer, I see that the only living thing on its surface is one bad boy who runs rapidly all about, imagining that he is trying to escape from an angry parent or master. As his distress abates, however, he begins to look about him and slowly to realize that he is rushing about on the surface of a model and that no one is in pursuit. When he has finally admitted this situation to himself, he sits down and looks terrified and then, bursting into fresh tears, he wishes that a parent or master were, in fact, pursuing him.

  I thank Radcliffe and he removes the model. When he returns, I ask him if he conveyed my message.

  “Oh yes,” nods Radcliffe, managing to infuse the affirmative with a curious and possibly insolent significance.

  “And what did the Holy Father say?”

  “He received me,” narrates Radcliffe, for it is his peculiarity as a menial to assume the manner of a great sage and prophet, “in a chamber decked for a celebration. About this chamber, pausing before the likenesses of his sanctified predecessors, he paraded for some time with great solemnity so that I was silent with bowed head imagining him to be preoccupied with matters dear to the spiritua
l aspiration of his holy office. Finally, after he already remained long before a narrow shrine or altar, erected in a sweet and airy alcove, I drew near, hoping, perhaps, to hear murmured and fragmentary reflections on the terrible origin and turbulent history of the macabre relics there displayed. However, ‘old bones’ the gaunt and olive pontiff was complaining, ‘and Irish linen. How bad the flies are.’ Then, not formally acknowledging my presence for the first time, but rather in the casual and sudden way that one long unfamiliar with other than reverent audience receives another into his mental world, he addressed me:

  “‘Are not the flies bad?’

  “But immediately a parched smile flickered across the august features as the tender voice amended, ‘No, it was yesterday—and in another place.’

  “Then, nodding his head slowly, as if to affirm that, beneath shelter of these irrelevancies, he had been earnestly and profoundly considering that question which had been the subject of my mission, he slowly, gravely and yet—unless it was only in the ears of my loyalty that some subtle note of this last quality sounded—hopefully spoke once more.

  “‘No words—I have no message for your master.’”

  “And was that all, Radcliffe?” I ask the emanation. “He said no more?”

  “He said more,” corrects Radcliffe gently, “many things. He spoke of the destruction and distortion of many things. He spoke of straight lines incredibly warped by the stresses of expediency and desire. He spoke of continuity and lingered on its father memory. He picked out a yellow-petalled flower and, separately, a yellow-skirted gown. The butterflies and gossamer, he intimated, had long since blown as dust. A patch of sunlight, urine, the towers of an imperial city. He spoke of that sequence which linked his office to every office, the partition of affairs, and, as he dwelt on problems of conation, he seemed to be confirmed in his earlier conclusion for, if anything more vehemently, he now repeated: ‘no words, no—tell him nothing—tell him nothing—’”

  Radcliffe then describes his departure and his journey back.