John Banville

by The Infinities (v5)

  There is no doubt whom it is that Benny Grace was speaking of, whose demise he was denying, or at least the imminence of it. The very certitude of the denial, abrupt and seemingly uncalled for, is what has so unsettled the rest of the table. My kinsman Thanatos, son of Night, in his black robes, with sword unsheathed, has stepped into their midst out of the shadows where he has been biding all along. It is his sudden coming that wakened Rex the dog, who rises cautiously now and stands at point, nosing the tensened air. These are the moments that unsettle him most, when their moods change abruptly and seemingly for no reason. They were all talking, he knew that even in his sleep, and now they are quiet and sit very still, as if something had frightened them anew, that mysterious thing that always frightens them, all except the fat stranger, who seems concerned for nothing. Meanwhile outdoors, beyond the glass wall, the trees on the far side of the sunlit lawn stand like a line of people with their backs turned, gazing off indifferently at something else.

  Not die, eh? So that is his little game, that is what he has been brought here to accomplish. Since when has he become the lord of life and death, Mr. Benny so-called Grace?

  Yet why am I vexed? What is it to me whether one of them dies or lives? They will all go, in the fullness, in the emptiness, of time. My sole task is to take over from the undertaker and escort them to the next life, whatever it be, different for each of them. Death they consider always caducous; the nonagenarian, bald and toothless as a babe, ignores the silt in his arteries, the amyloids in his brain, and imagines himself in no more than his late prime and good for at least another ninety rollicking years. We should let them have a taste of immortality, see how they like it.

  Soon enough they would come to us mewling and puking in their pain, beseeching us to finish them off. My father did once consider giving them the gift—ha ha—of eternal life. This was many years ago, oh, many years, in the time of Electryon king of Mycenae. Here is what happened. The old king’s nephew Amphitryon—yes, the very same—and grandson of my brother Perseus the Gorgon-slayer, became enamoured of his cousin Alcmene, Electryon’s daughter—yes, yes, I know, the bloodlines getting all tangled up, as usual. Amphitryon had fled to Thebes, having managed accidentally to kill his father-in-law in a bit of bungling on the battlefield—at least, he claimed he had not meant to run the old boy through—and Alcmene, a spirited girl, followed him there and married him, after vicissitudes too tedious to waste time picking over here. Alcmene was an exquisite creature, a golden girl, and needless to say my Dad took a shine to her, and employed what we know is one of his favourite wiles to get her into bed, to wit, he came to her at twilight in the very form and aspect of her husband. They passed a divine night together, pseudo-Amphitryon and his darling girl, and with the dawn my Dad withdrew—I shall plod on, steadfastly ignoring the inevitable double entendres—when who should appear but Amphitryon himself, home unexpectedly from the wars. See how I am warming to my tale. The lady Alcmene was baffled, of course, to find her husband apparently popping up again in her chamber a minute after he had left and behaving as if their night of passion had not happened; nevertheless she gamely submitted to a further strenuous session on her already disordered bed—General Amphitryon had been away a frustratingly long time in Thessaly, hacking at his old adversaries there, and was no sooner in the door than he set to asserting his conjugal rights. The result of this double bout of fructifying romps was, in due course, a pair of twins, Iphicles, who was Amphitryon’s son and therefore not much heard of again, and Heracles, whom my Dad was pleased to call his own. A breather.

  Heracles, this strapping lad, grew into a mighty man, the greatest of the great heroes of old, blah blah blah. Now, nothing that my father does is ever simple or straightforward, but the machinations by which he arranged for Heracles, who was brave but not the brightest, to carry out the plan to make mortals immortal were devious far above even his usual standards. Having first of all driven the poor fellow temporarily demented he next arranged for him to be instructed by the oracle at Delphi to put himself in fealty to Eurystheus king of Tiryns, who in turn was inspired to impose on the hero, for no apparent reason or discernible purpose, a series of tremendous and well-nigh impossible tasks. You will know of these famous Twelve Labours of Heracles, the killing of the many-headed Hydra, the capture of the Erymanthian Boar, the pinching of the girdle of Hippolyte queen of the Amazons, and all the rest; of the dozen of these tasks, however, eleven were no more than blinds behind which to pass off the twelfth, the supposed abduction of Cerberus, which feat was effected with the help of yours truly and my sister Athene, that headache, and which itself was yet another blind, for the intended elimination of Pluto himself, no less. This was my father’s real intention, the true heart of his scheme, that Sis and I should escort Heracles to the gates of the underworld, where the barking of the guard dog would bring Pluto running to know who was the new arrival, whereon Heracles would bend his bow and loose an arrow into the dark god’s heart and strike him dead. The death of death!—imagine! It was not to be, however. All of Olympus rose up in rebellion, or threatened to. Here was the time for solidarity, we said, the time to show old Zeus the limits of his powers. He had been throwing his weight about for long enough, cuckolding gods and men alike and swallowing his relatives whole. If he were free to destroy death he would be free to destroy us all. We would not stand for it, it was as simple as that. And thereby survived Pluto, the killer of men.

  Why did Zeus think to put death to death? I have not enquired of him and never will; there are certain questions one does not pose to the father of the gods. However, this does not mean I may not speculate on the matter. Is it that he could not bear to think of his beloved girls—broidered with bulls and swans, powder’d with golden rain, as the silver poet puts it—writhing in agony on their deathbeds, who had writhed in his arms for joy? If so, why not just kill off all the males and let their better halves live forever? No, it makes him out too kind, too caring. He wished them all, girls and boys alike, adults in their prime, oldsters and crones, all to know what we know, the torment of eternal life. Why must he have a reason? Call it cruelty, call it caprice, call it the revenge of heaven’s lord on the creatures he had made. Or maybe he thought to make a new race of demigods, there is a thing to think of—not only living forever but, my goodness, forever procreating, too, until the world is packed tight with them and they are forced to storm heaven for a new place to populate. Brr.

  Anyway, there you have it, his dastardly plan was thwarted and, thanks to us, his extended family, men may go on dying in the good old way.

  Rex the dog is growing drowsy again: his heavy head droops. The darkness that Benny Grace’s words brought forth now gradually withdraws, and the others at the table pick up again uncertainly, like gleaners after their midday rest setting off again between the furrows. And I hover in the air above them, my chlamys spread as wide as it will go, in the attitude of Piero’s Madonna della Misericordia, protecting my little band of mortal sinners. I am not all sneers and scathings, you see, I have my gentler side.

  Petra seizes her chance and breaks the silence by asking of the table, in a loud voice, why it is that tumours are always compared to citrus fruits. “As big as a lemon, they say,” she says, “an orange, a grapefruit—why?” She looks about the table, fierce in her demand, but no one has an answer to offer her.

  No two things the same, the equals sign a scandal; there you have the crux of it, the cross to which I was nailed from the start. Difference: the very term is redundant, a nonce-word coined to comfort and deceive. Oh, I told myself, I tell myself, that to say equal to is not to say identical with, but does it signify, does it placate? My equations spanned a multitude of universes yet they posited a single world of unity and ultimate order. Perhaps there is such a world, but if there is we do not live in it, and cannot know how things would be there. Even the self-identity of the object is no more than a matter of insisting it is so. Where then may one set down a foot and say, “Here is solid gro
und?” As a child I was terrified at seeing the hands of a ticking clock turned back, thinking time itself would be reversed and all collapse into disorder, yet I was the very one who would break time’s arrow and discard the slackened bow. Benny Grace used to mock me for my doubts and ditherings. What business is it of ours, he would scoffingly ask, echoing the schoolmen of old, what business is it of ours to save the phenomena? That was the difference—the difference!—between the two of us. I raged for certitude, he was the element of misrule. When I think of him now I hear again the music of the past, raucous and discordant but sweet, too, the sad sweet music of being young.

  Whatever he may say to deny it, we did bring something to a close, we adepts of the temporal. After us, certain large possibilities were no longer possible. In our new beginning was an old end. I recall the atmosphere in the academies in those days, even in those early days of the revolution we had so fearlessly set going. Euphoria first, then the dawn of misgiving, then an increasing lassitude, an increasing jadedness. Arguments would still break out, squabbles rather than arguments, too overheated to be sustained, and ending always in impotence and savage frustration. There was a particular aspect people had when they turned and slunk away from these confrontations, hangdog, muzzled, the mouth drawn sideways in a snarl. A savour had gone out of things, the air was that much duller, the light that much dimmed. We could not comprehend it, at first, this darkening of the world that was our doing—it was, after all, the opposite of what we had intended. Somehow, extension brought not increase but dissipation. My final series of equations, a handful of exquisite and unimpeachable paradoxes, was the combination that unlocked the sealed chamber of time. The sigh of dead, dank air that wafted back in our faces from the yawning doorway out of what had been our only world was not the breath of new life, as we expected, but a last gasp. I still do not understand it. The hitherto unimagined realm that I revealed beyond the infinities was a new world for which no bristling caravels would set sail. We hung back from it, exhausted in advance by the mere fact of its suddenly being there. It was, in a word, too much for us. This is what we discovered, to our chagrin and shame: that we had enough, more than enough, already, in the bewildering diversities of our old and overabundant world. Let the gods live at peace in that far, new place.

  What a pair we must have made, though, Benny and I, the overman in his overman’s cape and tights flashing through the ether with his fat sidekick clinging on for dear life to his neck. Or was it the other way round, him flying and I clinging on, for dear life? For dear life is what I could never quite get the hang of. Others seem to manage it easily enough: they just do it, or have it done to them—perhaps that is the secret, not so much to live as be lived, let life itself do the work. Certainly that was how Benny seemed to carry it off. Fetching up breathless with emptied pockets and skinned knees after another one of our escapades together, I would look around and find him brushing the dust off his sleeve and humming unconcernedly to himself, as if we had been on nothing more adventurous than a Sunday-afternoon stroll. Did I have a taste for the low life before Benny came along and dragged me gaily into the gutter for a respite? I know I liked it, once I was there, paddling in the piss and spittle. Here, I told myself, is the real thing, the business itself, raw and coarse and vital, this is what it is to be alive. No gentle Inges or Ursulas down there, only drabs and cutpurses and the odd poor Gretchen searching forlornly for her Faust.

  I should not exaggerate. I am at heart a timid soul and the scrapes that Benny got me into were no more than that, scrapes and japes and schoolboy pranks. He would turn up at odd times and in unexpected places, but if I was surprised, he never was. That was the uncanny thing, the way he would come bustling yet again into my life, in mid-sentence, as it were, and link his fat arm through mine and steer me aside from whatever I was doing and walk me off into a corner to propose in an earnest undertone some new, preposterous wheeze. He always made it seem that he had been gone no more than a moment or two and now was back, doing up his flies or rolling his shirt sleeves, ready to get the ructions going again. Girls, of course, there were always girls, I marvelled at his way with them. What did they see in him, what was the secret of his roly-poly charm? He would wander off into a crowded bar, a hotel lobby, a conference hall, and come back five minutes later with a likely romp on either arm, the short one for him and the tall one for me. More often than not these encounters fetched up in disaster, or farce, or both—gin-tinted tears, smeared mascara, a definitively hitched-up black silk strap—but Benny was never daunted, would accept no rebuff, admit no failure.

  He deplored my taste for Inge and her ilk, the dainty, damaged ones, but I felt no call to defend myself against his gibes once I met Madame Mac. Here I must pause, and confess to a slight constraint, a slight embarrassment. That I took her at first for his mother is one thing, but that I am still uncertain that she was not—his mother, I mean—is surely quite another. He never said who she was, exactly, or specified the nature of their relation, and in the way of these things, after a certain interval it became impossible to ask. He referred to her only as Madame Mac or, sometimes, as “my old lady,” so there was no help there.

  Early on there seemed a clear disparity in age between them, and he could well have been her son, but as the years progressed and age coarsened his admittedly never youthful form the gap narrowed and with it my uncertainty widened.

  He was not himself, not the self that I was accustomed to, when he was with her. His demeanour veered between a worried lover’s fawning deference and a brusque irritability that to my ear bespoke the filial. I was first introduced to Madame Mac, if introduced is the word, in Rome, I believe it was. I was there to accept the Borgia Prize, founded in memory of gentle Cesare, peacemaker and patron of natural sciences and the arts. I remember well the hotel, one of those gloomy timeless palaces to be found in every capital city, the corridors humming with a vast silence, in all the rooms a worryingly fecal smell, and the unseen below-stairs staff audibly at their larks. In the muffled lounge, where it would always be afternoon, vague bodies were fidgeting over coffee cups and little cakes, and the tall windows were ablaze with an amazement of blue October sky. Had Benny and I arranged to meet or was it another of our chance stumblings across each other?—chance on my part, if not on his. Under one of the windows a woman was seated in an armchair before a low table; with the light behind her I could not make out her features, though I had the feeling that she was regarding me intently. She was leaning forward rather heavily, her skirt stretched tight over splayed knees, while the chair in which she was seated seemed to reach out its stubby wings on either side of her as if striving to draw her back into its brocaded embrace. The dress she wore was made of what seemed swathe upon swathe of multicoloured stuff printed with a large design, roses or peonies or some such, and might have been a continuation of the figured covering of the armchair, so that she was camouflaged and appeared a congeries of disjointed parts, head, arms and hands, thick short legs. All this detail noted in hindsight, of course. At her back, in a corner of the window, an oleander bush tossed and tossed in the hot wind of a Roman autumn.

  Benny when he arrived was all bustle and hand-rubbing. He was wearing his inveterate black suit and grubby white shirt. He complained of the chilly air-conditioning—it is never warm enough for Benny, we have that in common—and chafed his hands the harder. He seemed uninclined to sit, and due to the way my chair was facing I had to turn my head awkwardly to the side and upwards in order to meet his eye. Come to think of it, there was always an awkwardness in the stance I felt myself forced to adopt in his presence, I had always a crick in my neck when he is about. I noted a certain shiftiness in his manner on this occasion, a certain breathy excitedness. He said he would take a glass of wine but seemed to be concerned with something else. He was casting about the room as if at random, and now his glance came to rest on the woman by the window. Did they exchange a signal? Benny cleared his throat and mumbled something, then walked to where the
woman was sitting and positioned himself beside her chair in the attitude, head back and one shoulder lifted, of a frock-coated gentleman posing for a daguerreotype, and directed back at me a summoning frown. I rose uncertainly and went to him. “This,” he said gruffly, almost dismissively, “is Madame Mac.”

  She directed at me from her chair a calmly appraising gaze, and lifted a hand as if for me to kiss it, the back of it graciously arched and fingers limply dangling; I shook it. The thing had the cartilaginous smoothness and faint heat of a bird’s claw. She was wearing something on her head, a close-fitting hat or a scarf tightly bound, which made me think of Lily Brik shouting the good news in that famous poster, or of one of Millet’s cloched peasant women. I had the impression of bright festoons, bits of ribbon, silk streamers that shimmered and fluttered about her. Her face appeared wider than it was long, with a great carven jaw and an almost lipless mouth that seemed to stretch from ear to ear and managed to be at once froggy and almost noble. Her skin was greyish-pale and looked as dry as meal. Within the voluminous dress she wore there was the suggestion of hidden folds of unrestrained flesh. Foul-minded as I am I at once set to picturing Benny and her engaged in congress, like a pair of walruses thrashing and trumpeting in a boiling sea; perhaps that is why, the next moment, my mind introduced to me the possibility of a blood tie between them, so that I should never again be obliged to entertain such an image. Madame Mac’s eyes were the thing that struck me most forcefully. They were glossy, slightly starting, not large but unnervingly piercing, and so intense they made the rest of her features, even that extraordinary mouth, fade behind their light. My memory of that first occasion insists her eyes were black, but later when I took the trouble to notice them they seemed a shade of deep violet—can eyes change colour, according to circumstance, the play of light, the mood of the moment? I must have sat down. I do not know what I said to her, or she to me. Did she have an accent? It did not strike me, if she had. Another mystery. At her shoulder, in the window, the oleander bush with its polished leaves shivered and shook, as if successive douses of water were being poured through it. Perhaps it was the contrast between the stillness of her broad grey flat face and the frantic movements of the bush behind it and the scraps of fluttering silk about her person, but what she reminded me of most strongly was an electric fan, with its warning tassel tied to the mesh, turning its bland, tilted head slowly from side to side, and the blades behind the mesh a motionless blur as they spun and spun and spun.