Gut Symmetries

by Jeanette Winterson

  Yes, my life. You are what you eat. There was nothing to eat. I kept slipping backwards in my mind to the night with Alice when she confessed that she would like to do it with a woman. We were eating liver. Liver. I couldn’t get my mind off the liver. When Stella and I finished the last of the cheese biscuits I was salivating liver. I’m sure you know it is the largest internal organ in the body weighing between two and five pounds. When I looked at Stella what I saw was her liver.

  I had to do it. She was dead. She was nearly dead or I could not have done it. If I had not done it she would have died anyway. I did it because I had to. What else could I have done?

  We had made love. We were close that night. We had talked and argued as we always did. Stella’s people are genetically engineered to dispute. Even their god, Jehovah, passes most of the Old Testament in dispute with someone, often Himself. My people are as many-shooted as our grape vines. We have our own opinions and we change them if we want to. What flourishes today may be clipped off tomorrow. Until then, nothing else is. So Stella and I argued. It was our intimacy.

  We had made love. I had been joking with her. Her old self surfaced in flashes, then the sea took it, and she was out of my depth again. She asked me to give the Jew the diamond. I wanted her to shut up. That kind of talk frightened me and I was scared enough by then. When she said we might have slipped through a kink in time, I almost, almost, started to believe her. Our isolation was uncanny. It felt as though we had sailed off the sea and into the stars themselves. I kept my sanity by making little cuts in my arm with a filleting knife. As long as it hurt I was real, I was alive. ‘I think therefore I am’ had no meaning anymore. Quite often I had the disagreeable sensation that I was being thought. This is a common effect of attenuation.

  The night was cool and silent. The moon was bladed. The wash of the sea on the boat had the sound of my mother’s ham slicer, the swish, swish of the keen edge through the easy pink. I fell into a kind of dream, almost a trance, a hunger trance, I suppose, and I was a child again and my mother was feeding me. There was a plate of fresh olives and bread, and swish, swish, she was slicing the ham onto my plate. Uta loved ham. She used to come to us on Saturdays, the Jewish Shabbat, and eat platefuls of forbidden pig. Stella always refused and her Mama had to buy her spaghetti. Little Stella, eating the pale strings one by one. Uta, mouth open, a contrast to her prettiness and delicacy, every finer sense brought beneath her cured idol. When she had finished her course of parma ham, she ordered liver and onions.

  I woke up. I could smell liver. I half rose over Stella’s body. She was talking, what was she saying? It was something about the diamond again. I said Stop it stop it, but it was as if she couldn’t hear me, as if my voice, high and cracked, was snatched upwards, while she, lying still, aimed her words at my empty belly, each one a punch.

  I wanted her to be quiet, that was all, for both our sakes, and I must have picked her up, doll-like-dead as she was, still talking, and I must have dropped her head against the swollen splitting planks, or was it her head that was swollen and splitting? I said Stop it stop it.

  Then she was quiet.

  I made the cut so carefully. I made it like a surgeon not a butcher. My knife was sharp as a laser. I did it with dignity, hungry though I was. I did it so that it would not have disgusted either of us. She was my wife. I was her husband. We were one flesh. With my body I thee worship. In sickness and in health. For better or for worse. Till death us do part. Till death us do part.

  I parted the flesh from the bone and I ate it.

  I had to do it. She was dead. She was nearly dead or I would not have done it. If I had not done it she would have died anyway. I did it because I had to. What else could I have done?

  The Lovers

  My mother and I were aboard the QE2. A spring cruise of fun and fantasy where every day had been parcelled and labelled with a mortician’s care. There was an undertaker on board but his services were not usually required.

  My mother had been intending to travel with my father to Hong Kong. It had been part of his retirement package, now guiltily extended over sea miles, calendar months and attendant family members.

  I had agreed to accompany my mother to Cherbourg, Capri, and as far as New York. On board ship, after I had put her to bed with a sedative, I had gone to the bridge to visit Captain Ahab, my father’s friend, my childhood adventurer. While I was waiting for him, I idly read the maritime bulletins.

  MISSING PRESUMED DEAD

  A yacht sailing off Capri was last sighted on Sunday June 16 at 18:00 hours. The boat was in difficulties. Severe storms prevented rescue attempts for 24 hours. It is thought that the boat could be drifting at sea.

  · · ·

  It was a hoax. It had to be a hoax. My thoughts, such as they were, my panics, my suspicions, my hatred, blew easterly and blew sour. Wherever they were, they would be safe, moored in their love. They had known that my father was dying and they had abandoned me.

  MISSING PRESUMED DEAD … Not true. Not true. Impossible that she should be dead. My gut was still connected to her. The present was not cut off from the future, emptied of blood. It was not Stella who was dead, not Stella and Jove, playing the games of the living. It was my father, my father who was dead. My father who was dead. Repeat it. Repeat it. Would the dead pile on the dead in an open grave?

  Here is the Captain. He will tell me the truth. The Captain, my father’s age, my father’s build, as kindly and dependable as the sea underneath him was not. No more tricks. No more lies. He would tell me the truth.

  As I embraced him I thought, ‘Suicide pact?’ Jove, who loved a flamboyant ending, Stella, who could not fail to be seduced by one. Jove, unstable as uranium. Stella, a living fission.

  And I? Closed off behind lead shutters; heavy, soft, blue-grey unhappiness dumbing me.

  I told Captain Ahab about my relationship with Jove. I did not tell him about my relationship with Stella.

  In London, before my mother and I had left for our Southampton tide, I had gone into my father’s room and opened his top drawer. The handkerchiefs were there, gaudy, luxuriant, waiting their turn for display. His watch was among them, silent now, no more quarters to the hour.

  I had sat on the floor, sieving the silk through my fingers, the weight, the smoothness, thinking about him. Deep in the drawer out of easy reach, I had found a bundle of letters, each envelope postmarked Berlin, the packet held together by the remains of a red silk tie. I looked at the signatures.

  ‘Your loving Uta.’

  ‘Never tell all thy love.’ My father in the Algonquin Hotel fastening his collar with a woman’s red-silk memory.

  I am my father’s daughter.

  The Captain promised me that he would find out all he could. I walked back to my cabin with a faint mixture of resignation and hope. Faint because nothing seemed able to penetrate my numbness. The sump of me was full already. The pain had nowhere to drain away and I could not hold any more. New pain did not, as yet, mean more pain. There was pain and I was airless under it.

  I kept thinking back to the Algonquin Hotel. Myself with my father in his tie, myself with Stella, dressed against hurt. As I half slept, I could not fully distinguish which was my father/myself, Stella/Uta, whether the distance we imagine separates one event from another had folded up, leaving the two clock faces to slide together, plates of time, synchronous.

  Look at the sun. The sun you see is eight minutes in the past, the time it takes for light to travel the distance between the sun’s eye and yours.

  Look at the galaxy. What you see is thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of years past, drama of the nebula only visible when it reaches us, effort of light, 186,000 miles per second, crossing centuries of history, still dark to us. The distances are vast. Space and time become space-time.

  How long does it take for an event to reach me? I thought I was present, thought I understood it all, but only later, in the cliché of a blinding light, do I realise the significance of what
happened. Only in the present do I begin to recognise my own past.

  ‘Look at me.’ Jove standing behind me on this ship in a ship’s mirror, his mouth, a pair of scissors cutting through my resolve. I had turned from the mirror image to look at him and he had kissed me. I closed my eyes, one does, perhaps that is why it took so long for light from the event to reach me. I begin to see what it was I did.

  As I waited, no word, I began to play a macabre game. If only one of them were alive, which one would I hope for? Champion Jove? Winning Stella? Which one of them did I love beyond the greedy love that we all shared? There was a bitterness to this dreadful game because I guessed that neither of them had chosen me.

  Last month, after our moot, Stella showed me Card XVI of the Tarot deck, L’amoureux, The Lovers. A young man seems to be trying to choose between two women, Cupid, arrow-borne, over his head.

  SHE: The Eternal Triangle.

  ME: Three is a masculine number. Odd numbers are masculine.

  SHE: Or are masculine numbers odd?

  ME: It’s my fault.

  SHE: It’s all our fault.

  She looked at the picture. ‘I think, perhaps, that the women are trying to decide for themselves and the man is taking no notice.’

  ME: How do you feel?

  SHE: Stop thinking of feeling as something you have to hunt down.

  ME: I am much better at saying how I feel when I no longer feel it.

  SHE: The dead bury the dead?

  ME: I didn’t mean …

  SHE: I know. I have made up my mind.

  ME: What?

  SHE: It is my own decision. Not for Jove and not for you. For myself. That is the only proper way to begin again.

  I never found out what it was she had decided. She had arranged to meet me the following day but I had the telephone call from my mother and I have not seen Stella since then.

  In the night, dream-disturbed, I was swimming breast stroke in a black sky, no light in it. I turned over onto my back, and kicking with my feet to keep myself level, I saw the stars in an upturned hod, tipping out over me. I raised my arm to shield my face.

  ‘Stella! Stella!’ Who touched me? I awoke on the silent ship. Two thousand five hundred souls, and I, alone.

  In the early morning, the sky mosaiced with birds, I heard from the Captain that the yacht was our yacht, that a thorough search had revealed nothing, no wreckage, no bodies, no impedimenta, no signal. The waters were dotted with fishing boats and cruisers. The yacht could not have disappeared but it had disappeared.

  As a star collapses, the force of gravity on its surface becomes stronger, and because light beams bend under gravity, the space-time around the star becomes more and more curved. Eventually the star reaches a stage where nothing, not even light, can get away from it. An event horizon forms around the star, preventing any signal reaching the worlds outside. We know where it should be but we shall never see it. Its light is trapped.

  I went to Captain Ahab and asked him to send me in one of the launches, straight away to Capri. It was an absurd request and he agreed, even though he had to swing his ship slightly off course to land me at the little port I needed. And so, in the middle of the sea, at dawn, I acted as a human remora, smaller than small, bigger than big, attaching myself to the rudder of the world’s largest liner and fixing its way.

  It was now eight days since Jove and Stella had gone missing.

  · · ·

  At the hotel reception there was a note for me.

  ‘You must have the wrong person. No one is expecting me here.’

  ‘No, no, Signora, questo e il vostro nome.’

  I opened the faded envelope. The instructions, in ink, were clear. Hire a boat. Meet the writer at the quay at tide.

  Why did I do it? There was no other way forward and it was too late to turn back.

  The Ship of Fools will be sailing tonight.

  On board: Captain Alluvia Fairfax. A cabin boy who speaks no English and wears a tag around his neck that reads ‘Friday’. The third, a gentleman who stood behind me as I roped the boat and said, ‘Call me Ishmael.’

  I swung round to him. His skin looked as if it had been stretched over his body with tongs. He was piano-wire taut. The wound tension in him vibrated. He was still and not still. He had been pitched at A flat. When he spoke his voice held a curious tremolo.

  He was dressed in black. His shoes were dusty. His trousers hung as though they had some time since devoured his legs. His white shirt had yellowed to ivory. His waistcoat was high cut, George the Third English, of what had been an expensive material. Now it had retreated into black holes of self-oblivion. He wore no tie. His coat, to the floor, had a bag of bread rolls in one vast pocket. His hat had been the patient receiver of a lifetime of knocks. He took off his hat when he spoke to me. His hair, falling over his face, had no grey in it. I had once peered into the crater of a volcano and seen its lava, hot and remote. Such were his eyes.

  His manner was gentle. He held his hat like a shield over his navel while he talked. His voice was quiet and unambiguous. Friday sat on the deck in the lolling water and stared and stared at this upright figure of insistence.

  ‘I will take you to them, my liebling and the k’nacker.’

  ‘Why haven’t you told anyone what you know?’

  ‘I was waiting for you.’

  ‘You didn’t know I was coming.’

  He shrugged and gestured towards the boat ‘Ich eil zich.’

  Cast off, we curved over the sea, star-reflected.

  I prayed that Jove and Stella would be alive. Why had I agreed to the holiday? I had been reluctant to do so. It was Jove who had persuaded me how much the holiday would mean to Stella. I wanted her to be happy. I did not want my own feelings to capsize us.

  My feelings dismay me. I so rarely control them. They are their own kingdom, too primitive to be a republic, and when they want to, they send their armies to batter me. My total self should include feeling but I do not know how to make a treaty with that warrior state. When I was growing up I rebelled against feeling and now my feelings rebel against me.

  I separated myself from too much hurt. Even now, there is a close association in my gut between feeling and pain. Logically I recognise that feeling is, often is, pleasure and delight. Nevertheless, at an instinctual level, at a level outside of logic, feeling is pain.

  I love badly. That is, too little or too much. I throw myself over an unsuitable cliff, only to reel back in horror from a simple view out of the window. The melodrama of my childhood has located itself in a heroes/villains psyche of He Loves Me He Loves Me Not. The lecherous twirling moustaches, the asexual saintly forehead, my lovers divided into exciting predators and insipid prey.

  In this overlit twilight world, the fluorescent compensating for the lack of natural light, my feelings run riot on sadism, masochism, ruthlessness and mutilation. Exactly what you would expect from a barbarian state. I am civilised. My feelings are not.

  I want to love well. To see you as you are, not as a character in my film noir. I want the unknowableness and intimacy of another human being.

  I say I appear naked before you, but so often I whistle for my invisible armed guard; the gap-toothed, jeering, club-headed mob, my feelings, that are used to having me to themselves.

  At my mother and father’s foie gras parties, I invented for myself a squat-faced troll who pulped the hated guests with a nailed bat. This troll, Anger, his crony Pain, were easier to summon than to banish. As I grew older, they mated, and now I have a squadron as Snow White had her Seven Dwarfs. Anger, Pain, Fearful, Nervy, Callous, Nightmare and Ruthless. Keepers of my soft heart, they feed upon it. How shall I coax them to leave off their meat and come blinking upwards into the light?

  When I met Jove there was a brief burst of liberation. Then my unconscious watchers reclaimed the land. Old habits twisted round new chances. If I had a squadron he kept a battalion. He had one virtue; he did not call sex, love.

  When I
met Stella, I was so excited and appalled at making love to another woman that the Miseries took much longer to regroup. Old patterns of behaviour could not be re-established because I had never known anything like this before. The shock of the new and it worked.

  For a time. Then the trolls wiped that look of amazement off their vestigial faces and came at me again, Nervy and Fearful in the lead.

  I did something extraordinary. That is, extraordinary for me. As they were punching Stella to death, using my voice, my arguments, my cleverness brutally turned to their account, I pulled her out of the way and stood in between. My lover was not my enemy. They were.

  If this is going to succeed it will take years. I will have to find the years because I want to stand before you naked. I want to love you well.

  Out now, into the willing water. The sum of all possible universes is here, now, at this prow, at this mast. Our sea coordinates plot our venturing point, but our wave function describes where we are and where we are not. Glancing at Ishmael as he eats his stew, I would not swear an affidavit that he is here and nowhere else. His body itself stretches. He is more of a constellation than a man. Here’s his belt, his arm, his leg, his mind, who knows? The parts of him are star-flung.

  I used to argue with Jove about wave functions. What to him were manipulatable facts were for me imaginative fictions. Experimentally, it is beyond doubt that electrons exhibit contrary and simultaneous behaviour. What does that suggest about us? About our reality? What is unwritten draws me on, the difficulty, the dream.

  We cannot talk about atoms anymore because ‘atom’ means indivisible. We have split it.