“What happened when you were away?”
Savinien stretched and edged himself up to sit. I saw the way his body moved together as one live thing, the shadow of pain around his mouth once, the way his chin tipped up and back fluidly and then fell to rest. His hands folded one above the other near his waist, they rose and fell with his breath.
SAVINIEN WAS RIGHT, the story he had to tell was ugly. Particularly, its pain surprised me. Some suffering I find intellectually dreadful but I will allow it to strangers every day. Certain words, sentences, memories, I never want my friends to have.
I don’t mention this to set myself up as a great, or even an especially firm, kind of friend. I am showing you one of my ego’s earliest, tenderest lines of defence—my mind is not built to support the cultivation of friends, because friendship is a source of pain. Today I know that pain is infectious, or to be more exact, contagious—it requires a certain contact, a closeness to slip in. If I feel, if I care, if I love, then life can kick me in the heart at any time it chooses. I am opened like a fish to hurt with one simple movement, one deep touch. I would rather this didn’t happen, on the whole.
“But I am certain that I killed no one. Nobody died, or if they did I had no part of it. Or if I did then I regret it very much. Still, since I left you, I do not believe I took a single life.”
I closed my eyes and concentrated on the shape of the chair beneath me. Something sank away in my mind and yawned out over an unimaginable depth. “Savinien, I don’t understand what you’re saying, could you explain, please, to me? Could you explain? At the beginning.”
“I do not think I killed anyone. I believe I did not and I would remember killing. I know how that feels. I know the look of dying. I have told you this.” He halted himself for a moment. “You should not have me in your home. I realise that you feel you know me, but you do not. A man of my kind, with an uncleanness inside . . . I should not be welcome in your home.”
“Well, I’m afraid it’s too late for that. You’re already welcome and there’s nothing you can do to change that. Do you understand?”
He made a dry little laugh which I ignored.
“Look, at the beginning, you could start there and then I would know what you mean. But there is nothing you could say that would change us, your welcome here. Nothing. I do mean that.”
And then he started to speak very slowly, clearly, mainly looking ahead of him, as if the words he said were written on the air before his face, but very small so that he had to peer and concentrate.
First, he told me where he’d been which made me sad because for all those lost weeks, he’d stayed ridiculously close. For some reason, the idea of such a tiny, but total, separation suddenly set me feeling how stupidly alone we both had been. The comfort of our present state seemed very fragile.
“Yes, the entire time. I was almost still here. To be simple, I could not leave entirely. Eh . . . no, they once took me somewhere else which I would not think about now . . . on a . . . I had to do something for them there and God forgive me and also them. But above the whole of this,” he gave the twitch of a smile, “I was truly never more than one hour of walking from here. Often much less. Believe me, there were nights when I went to sleep imagining that small walk home. I had neither hope nor faith for it, but it made a fine dream. When there was a moon . . . you know how near a moon can seem . . . I would watch it, lift my hand, étou . . . cover its light and let it shine and cover it again and it seemed then in no point proper that I could see something so beautiful as this and never touch it. I am close enough to know this thing and to desire it and yet I do not have the power to move and be with it. If I may furnish an example, I have held a man with my arms around him and my body over him to press his life back in, to hold it within his frame once a bullet has let it out and this has been all to no purpose. A moment before, he was complete with living, and next, so completely not. This is the same thing.”
He turned suddenly, open-faced, the colour in his eyes deep. “I wrote to his wife. It’s something to do, to write, isn’t it? When life has baffled an author and hidden its possibilities, then he can always write.”
He put his hands to his head. “Jennifer, I wanted to write this, in preference to being present with these words, but I can no longer write, I cannot set a mark on paper. The language . . . I am defeated . . . and I have the concentration of an angry schoolboy. And I have every right to say so, I have been one before. Then I was learning and now I am unlearning. I am nothing but forgetting. Every night God fills my mind with worlds to express and I can tell them to no one, record them for no one and be certain only that because they are mine, they are lost the moment they are born.”
I watched him scratch his ear, shrug and smile at somewhere behind my head. “This is not precisely my ideal condition. I wish you could see me at my best, I do.” And then a long, smooth look at me. “But now I would ask you to let me write to you.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand again.”
“Which is my fault. I am asking that you allow me to be not here. Simple, simple, only simple, nothing complex. Close your eyes and I shall close mine, not to be away from you, but to be nearer. With your indulgence, I will make you my reader and now there can be nothing between us, nothing to check your mind from entering mine. What this is, these words, is for ever. This is our lives speaking directly, having set us aside.”
“Well, I suppose, I’m here then. I’m listening.”
“Sssh. Your eyes.”
“Are closed.”
“And now so are mine. That day when I left, yes, to start with the start . . . I stood in your park and you moved away and into your life and I stayed where I was. Very dearly I knew that I could never be a part of this world, or of your reality. You had told me that the heart of the city was to the east and I could not have borne to be in a city of yours, of your time, I was not prepared to face that, so I went west. I ran to the west.”
As he spoke this time, I could hear his throat relax. He was forgetting himself, becoming his story.
“All was very strange. Your cars, how can you allow these things? They move people but they do so much more, they make such fear. At one point I was in amongst them and I could see one driver’s face, boxed up there with his wheel in the darkness, he was not making a journey, he was setting out to kill.
“And this was his choice, no affair of mine, but a suitable introduction to the customs of your country. Now I had an idea I would be safer if I climbed and I did this and found a wonderful high path that led clear between great, red stone houses and grey barracks, above the car-road and into ruined ground. I know how to live off ruined ground. This is not my preference but I do know how.”
He had found the old railway line. Some years ago, the route had been tarmacked over and turned into a cycle path which now led, albeit erratically, right to Loch Lomond. Savinien had never made it that far. Having no way of knowing that our countryside was not all one type or another of ruined ground, he had suffered no hopes of countryside if he moved on.
I think he had also chosen to stay where he could organise himself something like food. He may have scavanged a little, even stolen from the doocots by the path, although he avoided ever saying so. For part of the time he undoubtedly preyed off small game, setting traps. Or not.
“He came to my hand, I called him and he came.”
“He would have. Dogs will. You know that.”
“I know the theory. Father loved his dogs far more than I— no—far more than me. No, also far more than I. If the dog had been accompanied, of course, I would have stayed my hand, but he was just straying. A lost thing, like me.”
“You ate a dog.”
“In my time I have spit-roasted a monkey and eaten that. As I remember, its owner was the one at fault but I could hardly have eaten him. In any case, for its own part, the monkey was certainly an irritation far greater than its size might have suggested. They were very like each other, the man and the monke
y. I might say they were very close in many ways . . . very sympathetic . . .”
“All right . . . I think I can guess.”
“The monkey tasted good. But the dog tasted better. And I ate it through genuine hunger, not simple ill-humour, which makes an important distinction . . . No.”
He stopped, I heard a small movement and wanted to look at him, but did not. I kept my word, stayed blinded. He coughed several times and then began again, a soft, dry note in his voice, a defeat.
“No. What happened with the dog, I know very clearly. I have just told you a large lie. Possibly I had good reason. You should know, when I met the dog, I finally understood in my heart that I would do anything my fear and need instructed. When I swallowed the dog’s flesh, I also consumed my dignity and my own proper will. I ate up all I had that made my life a life.
“This is as good a point as any to tell the truth. I think so. Eh . . . then imagine an open place which is away from lights. A path runs across it and there is a tower full of doves but it is full night and I cannot see them. The ground here is often wet, I have fallen before in the mud. I have fought here and have felt a man kick against my grip like a body dangled on a noose when I held his head in water here. Now there is the shine and the crack of ice in the dark beneath us and the deep sky above. I feel I am standing between two nights and I wish I was alone to understand this, but I am not.
“There are men with me. They found me and came for me and have kept coming for me and I do what they say. This is not because they are my masters, I have never had a master. This is because they give me what I need, they feed me my heart’s ease and my sleep.
“For a time, you understand, I was very used to the peace I could find in wine until it made me slow and stupid and ill. Through my first years in Paris, in my other life, the wine was always there for me, slicing little ribbons from my soul and finding out my secrets to offer them beautiful promises and turn through the walls of my dreams. I almost dreamed myself to death. When I woke I swore I would rather drink arsenic than alcohol and I kept my word. A few of my dreams returned in life, but they lacked perfection. My writing was consistently far better and fuller than my own existence. The men from the waste ground gave me perfect dreams in little mouthfuls and I loved them.”
His words did not fumble, did not halt, they only faded very slightly sometimes at the end of a thought and there was a broken deliberation as he spoke each one of them out. Very quietly, very gently, under his breath there was the sound of his hurt. I knew this because I know how to listen and because it hurt me too.
“This night, the men and I, we have a fire. We turn and pace around it like the animals we have become. From my past experience, I know that I am here to fight. I will be engaged in another’s cause, defending another’s honour as I have done so many times. When I am left alone, victorious, my friend James will give me the medicine I need to cure me of the ills my last medicine left.
“And they tell me . . . James tells me with his lovely voice that the stranger who can no longer stand and so is now sitting in the mud is his enemy. The enemy of my friend is my enemy. But tonight I am not to harm the stranger because he has been harmed enough by James and his Inquisition. Tonight I am to demonstrate my skill at arms against the stranger’s second. Against his dog.
“I fought the dog. They gave me my sword and I fought the dog. It was strong and brave . . . près . . . almost the weight of a man . . . a not unworthy opponent. We were two creatures, owned creatures, kept to fight and terrify.
“But finally . . . Finally, I was angry and because I had no force to fight them and no dignity to show, I promised them I would kill the dog and eat it. I would roast it on the fire and throw them its skin. I kept my word. I have that, even at the end, my word, I had that when they laughed.
“I cannot tell you how familiar it always seemed when they laughed. I am accustomed to that ignorant ring a laughing crowd will make, standing closer than you can bear them, but still out of your reach and they look and they laugh. I would like to have a life when no one laughs at me, when my respect is with me like my shadow, something to take entirely for granted. Eh? Is this going to happen at some time? Wouldn’t this be just? A just and handsome thing?
“The dog’s flesh . . . the warmth . . . blood, it made me sick. The sound of it crying when I slashed its belly took away my appetite. It waited for me calmly once its strength had gone. I came to kill it and it watched me with eyes that were so puzzled. It could not understand its pain, nor why it had been so poorly rewarded for fighting with all of its heart. When I knelt by its shoulder, I gave it hope. Trusting, it tried to move towards me and whimpered and then tried to move and then I cut through its throat and into its spine.
“The men applauded me and I watched the firelight catching all about me in the blood.”
I could hear him rubbing at his scalp, steadying his breath.
“I do apologise. Believe me, I can offend no one more than myself. Pfff . . .
let me tell you how I lived before the men came. Let me purify my mind.
“When I first came to the wasted ground, I made shelters but they were broken down. Almost as soon as I left them on some occasions, they would be beaten into the earth or burned. In the night once, some of the men came to burn both me and the roof I’d made over my head. I think this was not a dream. I am sure I was woken by the rain one morning, away from any shelter. I would not have slept without covering myself, I could not have. But don’t mistake me, this changeable life was no hardship. I was less than anxious to fix myself down. I believed a more permanent address would encourage unwelcome curiosity. I was trying to make an independent life. That impossible thing. Free from false complications. Still, I was never delighted to come back from hunting and find my small belongings scattered in smaller and smaller pieces, even when I had hidden my position very well. And at last the fires did make me rather despair.”
In daylight, Savinien contended with an incomprehensible stream of joggers and bicyclists. He felt they had an air of rehearsal about them, a promise of light relief, almost of fantasm, hallucination.
“I decided this little path must surely be the route for some corps of messengers, or for a huge company of acrobats to practise riding their machines. Because you hadn’t told me about cyclists, Jennifer.” It was odd to hear my name suddenly, to remember myself. “What was I to think, this is obviously not a sensible way to go anywhere, I reasoned I was observing the repetitions of a circus troupe.
“Eh, but in the meantime my appearance was slowly becoming less and less engaging, or I might have spoken to one of these supposed acrobats. I have always liked jugglers and tumblers. As a boy I taught myself to have some skill in that area. It was a question of will. Because, without any kind of unusual action, my face alone would, you might guess, gather an audience. As you might say, I am not the most beautiful of men. Nor was I a beautiful child.” He cleared his throat. “I know this. It is the truth.
“Now, for whatever reason, the Creator of the Universe has made me another life, but not another face. Well, I am accustomed to myself, this is no hardship and it is often very difficult to hurt me, but when I was a boy I took to tumbling a little, you know, speaking all kinds of nonsense and making faces. I intended to show them, the laughers and the curious. I was telling them, ‘See, I want you to stare at me. I am making you laugh and stare. This is my will over yours.’ The grotesques, the actors and the street performers, I think I am close to them because of this. And what is a duellist, of whatever birth, if not a street performer, after all? Jennifer?”
“Yes?”
“Good, you’re still there.”
“Of course.”
“You don’t mind this? I must say it.”
“I know. I understand.” And I did, I completely did. And I wanted my friend to feel that I was with him, to reassure, so I spoke the words in the clearest way I could. Savinien began to talk faster and lighten his tone. Perhaps he thought he had upset me
.
“I was organising something one might mistake for a steady hold on my own existence when the cold closed down. That true cold, the ice we had, remember? The path became almost deserted. Men would come to feed and tend their doves and I would watch and then they would take down their ladders and leave again. In the close of the evening I would move down towards the river and see our lights reflected by the farther shore. Your world is so full, there is so little space for the privacy of proper dark.
“And there would come flares and moving shadows, a roaring above the clouds, and these things had been explained to me (you had explained them—these things that are plain . . . planes) but I did not know them in my heart. I felt oppressed by the numberless inhabitants of your land, constantly in motion and screaming with noise and yet I was also utterly adrift and afraid of my own stillness.
“Far to the east, a high barn was being forged out of metal and by night a man would guard it. He would sit by his fire and watch and I would want only to be him, to hold my hands out at those flames, to drink a little and to eat and to walk around my iron building before I left in the morning to go to my own home.”
I could hear his mind falter. He swallowed several times. I made a blind reach to take his hand and missed.
“It’s all right, though.”
“No. No, actually, it is not all right.”
“No.”
“But we manage our lives, even so, isn’t this the case?”
“I think that’s the theory.”
“God has a curious idea of free will.”
I listened to him shifting his weight on the bed. “I apologise. I am too tired to be good company. Would you mind if I sleep? I like to show my gratitude for rest when it comes.”
“Of course, of course, sleep. Please.” I opened my eyes and found I was looking directly at his face. We both blinked a little, getting used to each other’s colours and light. Since the beginning of our conversation, he had grown visibly exhausted under a pressure of words. His stare was dull, moist, slightly pink.
So I Am Glad Page 17