The Stillman
Page 24
I need that advice. I could turn to my father and get him to open the window, ask him what to do. Can you see, he says, can you see him in you as you see yourself in me? Alejandro looks up at his mother and might be thinking the same, wondering why his eyes are so big and so dark and my own so blue and how can it be so when the saying goes that it’s all in the eyes, these connections between us, it’s all in the damn eyes? There’s a flicker of amusement in those dark eyes, the kid’s a watcher, like me, only he’s watching me, patiently wondering what I’m going to do next, why he’s been brought here and how long does he have to stand in the cold watching this strange man with the pink dressing gown and green welly boots who at least is amusing him, making him forget the cold but who is he mama, who is he? I smile too, sharing his amusement and all of a sudden he looks anxious, looking up at his mother again. Adelina says something. Now they both seem unsure, perhaps wondering what I’ll do next, if I’ll walk away. Not back to the house but away from them, from the car, the music and the distillery, onto the moor, into the distance and never looking back. I have an almost overwhelming desire to hold out a hand. I imagine him recoiling violently at my touch, as if he’s been burned, his mittened fingers tightening around Adelina’s. No, it wouldn’t be right, it might suggest something I can’t ever live up to. He’s at that age, I can’t risk the first touch of his father’s hand being his first memory, a touch that was both a hello and a goodbye.
I look at my hands. Love and hate, Preacher Powell’s tattooed knuckles. What would Robert Mitchum do? I begin to hum. Leeeaning, leeeaning, leaning on the everlasting arms. Alejandro meets my gaze again. His eyes, so big and so dark and my own so blue. Adelina says something else I can’t be sure of because I’m singing. Leeeaning, leeeaning, leaning on the everlasting arms. They stare at me, Alejandro and Adelina, another intervention I still have time for. How about a silent long shot from their perspective? Jim Drever walks slowly into a grey, greyer distance, his figure becoming vague, vaguer as the snow thickens. Hold the shot for two, three minutes until he finally disappears. Or something schmaltzy, big on the strings. Drever’s indecision, a close up on his face, ambiguous wetness on the cheeks that could be tears or just melted snow. Which would be more believable? Because that’s the thing about a story, it has to be believable, doesn’t it?
* * *
Havana, Cuba, 22/4/1999
If I read of this situation in a magazine I would find it heartless. A mother writes a journal for her son, yet leaves instructions for it to be sent after her death. He would have questions, surely, questions that her death had rendered mute. Is there lesser cruelty in silence?
I am unsure.
Can I bear to forever remain a stranger to my only child? Would I not rather be the approximation here glimpsed and misunderstood, now one thing, now another, than a stranger? I find it difficult to settle on your perspective, imagining you both burning these pages, unread, and greedily devouring every one. I do not know if your life deserves an infusion of either or whether I should stay hidden.
The night he died John asked me, ‘how do the pieces of a life fit together?’ We were drinking beer in a midnight cantina in Guadalajara. He was wearing an open necked white shirt and seemed melancholy, as if he somehow knew that the poem he’d just finished would be his last. I remember a group of men at the next table burst out laughing and maybe their laughter inadvertently revealed the answer. Why worry, it doesn’t matter. A life fits together as it will, as the story demands, as valid in its own humdrum way as any other.
No, that little anecdote should not be read as justification for leaving you. I do not want to make the suggestion that I did not care. My words are only meant to relate, to reveal, what my story demanded.
All these ill-considered details, spilling as I write, once in the open they run free with a life of their own. That is not to say you should disregard what I have written to this point, only that as the journal continues you may wish to re-assess what has gone before. Such is the way of every true story, the reassuring lack of absolutes.
However, I fear I am too self-indulgent, too erratic, to be an engaging storyteller. My intention is to help you project, I want you to step towards me with empathy. Empathy rather than judgment, after all, is what we truly crave from one another. Perhaps you will grant me the relief of the former if I suggest that John’s early death was the price I paid for abandoning you, the equal and opposite reaction that could never be avoided, your pain balanced by my own.
What an intense few weeks, once I start writing I am up until dawn. There is so much more to come, much I have forgotten which is spilling back into the light. I have seen more stars in the last month than the last ten years. Aha, I hear you say, a shamed conscience preventing sleep, fevered regrets pouring down like silver starlight, one after the other? You would be wrong. To admit regrets is to suggest there may have been an alternative narrative. This is not to say I have not missed you, never reached out and imagined your life. But regrets? I cannot allow myself to consider such thoughts as regrets. That path leads only to madness.
Shall I let you read any of this?
To be forgotten is everyone’s greatest fear. There would be a measure of justice in my accepting that, drifting unknown to you into the ether.
One day you may come to Cuba. You might see the palm trees on Varadero beach silhouetted against the darkening sky, the individual fronds becoming an anonymous mass, shifting in the rising wind into whatever shape you wish it to be in that moment. If my wish is simply to be whatever you want me to be then I have so much more to tell you. The decision will come. In the meantime I will keep on writing. You may read these words, you may read those to come. You may know that I am here, was here, with the pieces of a life to fit together.
Mexico blues
it’s a mystery to me
three attempts at a landing
three times the mist and the mountains
I reach for you
my lips as dry as my body’s tired
I can’t take the crowds
I’ll breathe a cityful of dirty diesel
if it helps me sleep
Guadalajara’s broken
the child lies in the street chest heaving
I look in every mirror
but what can really be trusted?
every stranger’s a
mockery of ever presuming to know
each smile a knife
I never realised I knew how to use
I touch your troubled face
your little hands
I try not to admit
these are acts of remembrance
I imagine your own forgetting
a naked dance
in our empty room
the music only you can hear
JT, Guadalajara, Mexico, 1974