by Aashish Kaul
It seems to him that he has led all his life in a soft fog of memories. Whatever he has read and written, whatever he has heard and played, all that he has seen and done. Sounds and images come in flashes, while washing, cooking, walking, working. Everything he tastes, sees, touches, smells bursts into impressions. The solitary yelp of a dog reaching him from across the Marne is already that of many dogs barking in the stone quarries up in the hills in a night of his childhood. And now there is the figure of a black swan on an Australian stamp in his brother’s collection. But before long the swan is vanishing in the sound of a cowbell tinkling in the pastures under the peak of Monte Generoso, which is reflected in the waters of Lake Lugano. And now there is the little boy urinating against the wall in the painting by Salomon van Ruysdael, and now the smell of his own piss rising from the hedge under a bottom-heavy moon over the village of Laxenburg near Vienna, and now the neat row of prostrate figures on a roof, their bottoms bronzing in the sun, and now the little patch of yellow in Vermeer’s View of Delft that Proust’s Bergotte contemplates before killing himself, and now a wind-filled tree in a Cézanne landscape forever free from the gaze of man, and now the smoothness of a stone fished from the bed of the Rhine, and now the golden engravings on a pencil leaving a yellow shadow in the inside margin of a book’s page, and now Joyce’s inhuman lament at Lucia’s worsening state and his own blindness, and now Valéry’s explication how the Wake was nothing but a magnificent waste, and now the backbreaking work in the red farms of Roussillon, and now the agreeable weight on the spine of a sack of grain for chopping wood for the farm owner, and now the Irish sun slipping past the flowing mane of a galloping horse in the racetrack in Leopardstown, and now the stolen Staunton chess set of his father, and now that shiny black pawn about to be promoted on the board, and now Duchamp’s voice telling of the invisible tears of rage and impotence welling up in him as he sat in the taxi clasping his Nude tight across his chest, and now the dirty chamber pot carried past a group of people at lunch in the middle of the day, and now the joy of mounting a camel in the Sahara, and now the inverted moon seen in the curve of the Atlas Mountains, and now the silhouette of a woman waiting in a Tangier teahouse, and now a line of Dante, and now the clear image behind that line, and now an old, wrinkled face in a frosty night, and now the beat of his own steps, and now the delicious sound of the club hitting the ball on the golf course in Belfast, and now that moment of pure emptiness that makes the sound delicious, and now the fall back into the mess of existence, and now the lilt of a trumpet in a jazz bar in Holland, and now the red in the Mandala on the wall of that bar, and now the taste of blood in his mouth, and now those resigned yet definitive words: Je ne sais pas, Monsieur. Je m’excuse, what charming manners!, and now the words merging to form that one word he has been trying to make for years, a word as long and hard as an excited member, and now the swing of the heavy blade chopping the member free of the body, and now the sound of his wife working on the sewing machine in her room, and now the look in her eyes that bespoke not just despair and anger at his nights of dissipation, but pity, both for herself and him, and that other thing which he can’t put into words but only compare, to what?, yes, that look he saw in the eyes of Artaud sitting lost in a café in Saint-Germain-des-Prés so many years ago, a look that will die with him, for he knows he was its sole witness.
Not another time, he had told himself, will he wander. Not again could he hold inside him that look in her eyes. But love by then had already left his bones, like a tide on ebb, and was held back only by a weak flesh. Thus the promise was forgotten one evening in Berlin, though this was not intended.
Rehearsals had not been going well. The ashcans, in spite of everything, were not exactly as he had seen them in his head. The actors were simply overdoing it. Too much colour, he kept repeating, too much colour. He had walked back from the Academy, unable to enjoy the view of the river. Is it ever possible to be true to an image, he wondered? Swiftly cutting through the trees, he entered the café opposite his studio, which went by the unlikely name of “Giraffe.” The fare was ordinary, to say nothing of the wine, but the place was quiet on most evenings and made him feel at ease. And before he knew, the woman he had agreed to meet there was speaking to him. First he answered without looking, smoking away absently. But presently he turned, and it was the angle that did him in. The yearning sprang at him with a simple twist of the neck. The first and last thing he saw was the milk-white earlobe with a beautiful pearl in it, entirely free of the dark hair that soared and coiled up right behind the head into a soft ball. His legs began to shake and, for a moment, like in Proust, he went deaf. This dreary world, it occurred to him, was also the best of all worlds. Like a hologram, it gleamed with a mere tilt of the arm.
He wakes up in a sweat. Even after hours he is not free of the dream. In his own garage, he saw a large iguana in birth pangs behind a red sports car, watched, at the same time as himself, in terror and fascination by a man he surely knows well but about whom he seems to have forgotten everything else.
Outside a thrush is singing in the cedar grove. He leaves his oak desk and, taking the water flask off the shelf, drinks from it greedily. Looking at these trees he planted years ago and which he has carefully tended through so many harsh winters fills him with a sudden longing for this earth which, he is well aware, he should soon be leaving. Two months, two years, not much more. The trunk of that blue cedar, he tells himself, already carries all the wisdom of Goethe and Shakespeare. A pity it has taken him so long to see the simple fact. The eye deceives. The eye cannot truly see until the last tear has been expunged. Which, of course, isn’t the case with him.
Yesterday he found a flute in the cottage. His nephew’s surely. Distractedly, he blows into it and from its modest wooden depths rises, note by note, a strange, tremulous melody as if heard from the ends of the earth or such as coming to him uninterrupted from a night of some ancient race beneath ancient star clouds. The bird watches him, ready to respond. But instead of the birdsong he hears a faint, unmistakably Irish voice reciting, no, singing with a slow soft breath the words of his youth, penned one damp, drunk and homesick afternoon in a bar in Soho. Oh hand in hand let us return to the dear land of our birth, the bays, the bogs, the moors, the glens, the lakes, the rivers, the streams, the brooks, the mists, the – fens …
Try as he might, he cannot put a face to that moving voice, he who has seen so many faces in dreams and waking. Burying his chin for warmth into the loose collar of his much-worn ash-blue turtleneck, he moves his tongue over the growth in his mouth which doesn’t pain him anymore. His mind is elsewhere, igniting the fire of memory by fanning the embers. Suddenly the flames are glowing and leaping higher and higher, and a smile slices his lips after many days even as he wipes away the tear that is about to drip.
*
The boat is bobbing up and down on the waves. Beneath an indigo vault heavy with stars, so many that they make a complete mess of the designs the ancients saw in them, the air is neither cold nor warm. He has removed the oars from the water and is rubbing his palms to calm the blood coursing through them. In the distance he can see the lights twinkling on the shore, and beyond these he can feel the mountains rearing their dark bulk. Across from him, his blind companion, his arms clasping the plank on either side, is alertly listening to the plash of water on the timber as if he can detect in it the rumble of clouds over an unknown planet.
At last I could write no more, breaks out his companion, on this, their third night together. At thirty-eight, I had tired of aping Quevedo or Thomas Browne. My bag had become empty of tricks. During this time, my father, who had been for a while impatiently waiting for death, died. I was heartbroken. He had taught me so much, given names to all my curiosities of childhood. Soon thereafter took place the accident I spoke of last night at dinner, recovering from which, almost in a spirit of learning to think again, I wrote my first real story.
He has been quietly listening. Yet somewhere inside him is th
e other who is recalling his own thirty-eighth year. Heartbroken. The very word he would have chosen. His beloved father long since turned to mud in the yard of that sorry old family church. And then the night when, watching over his unwell mother and reading Stevenson’s Letters, a window had suddenly opened on the mouldy cell where he had been slowly suffocating. Throw away everything you have accumulated over the years. Rid yourself of all the tricks, and get down to finding the funda-mental…
A few months before, carried on the other, I had taken up the first regular job of my life, predictably enough, at a municipal library, out in a dull southwest corner of the city. There were too many of us doing the simple work, classifying and cataloguing the library’s holdings. Naturally, my colleagues were more interested in betting on horses, telling obscene jokes and stories, and listening to soccer matches on the radio. Each day I catalogued about hundred or so books. Even with my failing eyesight, I could have easily classified four or five times that number, but I had been forewarned against being too enthusiastic in my work which could reflect unfairly on others. So having finished the task by noon, I’d repair to the basement of the building where, in a staff reading room, I read till it was time to go home. It was here that I read all of Gibbon, Bloy, and Bernard Shaw. It was here that I did those translations of Faulkner and Woolf which enjoyed some measure of success in my country. And it was here, in this modest, forgettable building wherein, ironically – but, well, there is no irony in it – I wrote of that infinite, monstrous Library which marred my dreams each night, picking up facts at random from the very room I sat in, and mixing them with anything I happened to be reading just then. Those ciphers, he says teasingly, have been endowed with undue mystical importance by readers who know nothing about this period of my life.
He is enjoying it. Listening to this soft, slow voice, moving carefully in the dark like a panther, the Irish tinge in it now and then rising above the sound of the lake. He lights up one of his slim cigars and blows on it leisurely. His companion can smell the tobacco on the air and breathing in once or twice continues.
Sometimes in the evening when I took the tram to return home, my eyes would fill up with tears. Mostly I’d be reading Dante. Although I remembered a fair bit by heart, I’d keep on reading, and soon the book would begin to lose its letters and grow more and more empty, until finally I was staring into a creamy eternity whereon the tears were freely falling. And then I’d remember Epictetus. Remember that the door is always open. So if I couldn’t muster the courage to end it all in one stroke, I’d do better to wipe away the tears. Next day, however, it would start afresh. Such is the sameness of our lives. Such is human feebleness. Why bother moving when you can only arrive at that from which you left? On and on I went like this for a good nine years. I know not why though. Maybe because I had gotten used to the drab routine of my days. Maybe because I was carried away on the thrust of the work I was then doing; work, which people today generously call my best. Or simply because time had already begun to set me free for my approaching blindness.
Speaking now for the first time since he rowed them out here, he tells of his school copy of Dante with his notes scribbled in the margins from fifty years ago to which he returns whenever he reaches a stasis in his work. Superstitiously, perhaps, he feels he will find there something new to begin. After all, he says in a voice barely perceptible, it was with Dante that it all began. The motion in stasis, and stasis in motion. The moving unmover.
The Comedy, says his companion eagerly, is, of course, the greatest work in all the literatures of the world. In its cosmology, I don’t believe for a minute, and yet it is the book I love the most. As for the moving unmover, one may look also at Zeno or the sophist, Gorgias of Lentini, who could well have been behind Kafka.
He nods from the opposite side of the boat, but this his companion cannot see who is silently reproaching himself for interrupting the other with his silly enthusiasm.
For a while none has spoken. Only the sound of water crashing against the boat fills up the silence, which is also another form of silence. He is thinking about the discussion they had earlier in the day, first regarding chess, the domain of the inexplicable for it has in it the light and the dark together, and later, Joyce and Finnegans Wake. His companion, an early champion of Joyce in the South, didn’t have much admiration to spare for the Wake. He wonders now whether he himself believes what he had said then: the Wake being the only possible development from Ulysses. That if the latter was the utterance of thought observing itself, the former was the very speech of the dreaming mind. As they row back to the shore, the lake sighs with each move of the scull.
How do you put in words the sound of water beating the wood? asks his companion. Better still, says he, how do you enter it? Earlier, arm in arm, we went to the cove from where you learnt to dive as a child. Did you hear the terrible cries of the gulls in the lee of the rampart? How easily they crawled into the roar of the tides, carried away who knows to what eternity…
He does not respond. The last few days have taught him at least this much: his companion is extremely shy and so almost all his questions are rhetorical. And, sure enough, before long the other is speaking.
My sight was always poor. I could see faces clearly only in photographs, by bringing them under my nose, by breathing over them. Thus I saw not the Viking swords in Yorkminster, but the hot Saxon blood they spilt on the ground centuries ago. Thus Buenos Aires is not a city but a habit for me. That is why many who have come to it through my writing have found it empty except place names, anecdotes, and a few friends. The markers of the blind. But I deviate. To return to the sound, to the water…
All through the War, my family stayed in Geneva and, oblivious to the happenings beyond the borders, I joyously swam in all the rivers of the Swiss country. Like a fish I went along and the flow of water which is also its sound entered my flesh and bones, writing its script in them. The same script I later divined in the spots of a leopard.
All these many years, it seems to me, I have just wanted to enter this sound. I can hear it in the words I keep rolling in my head. Yet what do I leave behind? Stillborn ideas. Empty scratchings on paper. Words, words, words. That prison from which I have been unable to rid myself. Exiled in myself, like Hamlet. It is in such moments that I completely grasp the agony of Shakespeare, lord and slave of words. It is in such moments that I become Shakespeare.
There came a time when I was an exile in my own country, amid banners and slogans, amid – what after a fashion was called – the deafening march of history into the future. Exiled in my body, exiled in words, and finally exiled on land as well. A land to which my ancestors gave their blood. A land whose vast wind-rowed wastes alone were enough to wet my eyes. A land whose glories I never did cease to sing, whether through its poets or its hoodlums. And then nearly in a whisper, a land I love almost physically, perhaps this is what I am often accused of – why only physically?
In America, says his companion, in Boston, a city I love, and I love many cities, I saw, no, only heard, but also felt deeply, your play of the man listening to his voice on tape…and the moment on the punt with the girl stretched out on the floorboards, hands crossed under her head, eyes squinting in the sun, and underneath all moving, all astir…A symphony of sounds taking you past knowledge into knowing. An image granted not through words, but in spite of them. A real image, not a label on the image. Expression in art, which Croce demanded from the artist, is mere vanity, a great mistake, as you have shown in your work. My gods, on the other hand, grant me only allusion.
On a sudden inspiration, his companion begins to recite in German a poem of Heine. He has not seen before eyes light up so at the sound of words. These are not the eyes of a blind man, eyes with a child’s innocence in them. So moved is he that he too joins in, at first under his breath, then boldly mixing his voice with the other:
…Als ich nach Hause ritt, da liefen
Die Bäume vorbei in der Mondenhelle,
Wie Geister. Wehmütige Stimmen riefen –
Doch ich und die Toten, wir ritten schnelle.
They have reached ashore, and he has moored the boat alongside the jetty. Now he helps his companion on to the pier and hands him his stick. In truth, only last year he was himself half blind, but the surgery on his cataracts has, for the time being, restored his vision. They walk away from the lake, the one on the arm of the other, matching their steps to the measured beat of the stick on the ground. He has always found something utterly compulsive in the sound of steps. He can hear not only their own, but hundreds and thousands of tired steps crisscrossing this tired, deformed earth of his. Unending line of steps, of men, women, and children, poor and hungry and homeless, armies of battle-fatigued warriors, prisoners of so many gulags and camps with lost, weather-beaten faces, young whores running away from their tormentors, inconsolable souls wasting away from their love of metaphysics, animals collapsing under strain of their load, little steps, giant steps, steps, steps, steps, walking from one horizon to the other, from there to another and another and another, and then only the pendular movement of the prisoner in the Santé Prison he has seen so many times from his apartment window, and then it is not the prisoner he sees, but the beast in the cage, taking the world with him, from sense to nonsense, from nonsense to sense, with its every turn, this beloved tiger of Señor Borges.
Thank you, says Señor Borges pressing his elbow a little more firmly, for the boat ride, for bringing me here, for everything you have said and done, for all that you have taught me these past few days. How many times since we left Paris have I told you of my love for this place, dearer to me than even the red maze of London.
He shakes his head silently, and in turn threads his own arm through the other’s, overwhelmed by emotion, unable to respond. No more is necessary, for the hint has been understood.