The Pen Friend

by Ciaran Carson

  It’s taken me some time to respond directly to your latest card, but I seem to have spent years in my mind since it arrived just yesterday. I note the stamp, the 65c Bluebell, a flower also known as wild hyacinth, behind which lies one of those Ancient Greek stories concerning the jealous cruelties of the gods, which so much resemble our own. It concerns the beautiful youth Hyacinthus, who was loved by both Apollo, the Sun-God, and Zephyrus, the God of the West Wind. But Hyacinthus preferred Apollo, and Zephyrus looked for revenge. So one day, when Apollo and Hyancinthus were throwing the discus, Zephyrus blew it out of its proper course, striking Apollo’s lover on the head and killing him instantly. Apollo, stricken with grief, raised from his blood a purple flower, on which the letters, Ai, Ai, were traced, so that his cry of woe might live forever on the earth. But since the bluebell that is native to these islands bears no such message, it was called Hyancinthus nonscriptus, not written on.

  And your postcard is barely written on, just my name and address, and the initial of your name, that I last saw twenty years ago, the slanted ascender of your N beginning on a curlicue and rising to an apex with the downward sweep of the diagonal, then rising again to end as it began in a matching curlicue. It is an elegant N that makes me think of the N we saw emblazoned on the bridges, monuments and state buildings of Paris, N that stands for Napoleon, whose remains are enclosed, like the last of a series of Russian dolls, within six coffins locked within a massive tomb of porphyry. You remember, Nina, how we thought N might more happily stand for Jules Verne’s Nemo, the captain of the Nautilus, Nemo meaning Nobody, whose underwater realm knew no boundaries of nation, or language for that matter, for Nemo and his crew communicated among themselves in a kind of Esperanto.

  Language takes many forms, as witnessed by your postcard, THE LANGUAGE OF STAMPS, a vintage curiosity, perhaps some eighty or ninety years old, which purports to show how the position of a stamp on an envelope or card can bear a coded message: upside down in the bottom left, DO WRITE SOON; right way up in the top left, DO YOU LOVE ME; slanted in the same corner, I SEND YOU A KISS; right-hand side of the surname, FORGET ME NOT; and so on. You’ve placed your Irish Bluebell in the top right-hand corner, which could mean either HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN ME, or nothing at all, since this nowadays is the conventional position for stamps, and we are not used to seeing any other. More meaningful to me is the fact that you were in Drogheda when you posted it the day before yesterday, some thirty miles nearer to me than you were. I know that you would have been thinking of my father, for you could not have forgotten my telling you that, when I was ten, he had taken me on a pilgrimage to Drogheda to see the head of the Blessed Oliver Plunkett. The Blessed Oliver Plunkett, my father had often told me, was the Archbishop of Armagh at a time of relentless persecution of Catholics. He had set up a college in Drogheda in 1670, which was razed to the ground a year later. In 1679 he was arrested on a trumped-up charge of fomenting rebellion; and in 1681 he was executed at Tyburn in London by hanging, disembowelling, quartering and beheading, the head and forearms being salvaged soon afterwards, hidden in two tin boxes, and thence transported to Ireland, while the rest of the body remained in England.

  It was December, the anniversary of Plunkett’s beatification, and bitterly cold. It was early afternoon when we arrived, and already it was getting dark. It was a long way from the railway station; as we walked the grey streets I knew that we were in a foreign town. The clothes in the shop windows looked different, and the butchers displayed unfamiliar cuts of meat. A fine rain was beginning to fall when we got to the church, which was strangely empty. There was an odour of wax and decaying incense. My father and I were the only ones who knelt by the shrine in a side-chapel, where the head of the Blessed Oliver was displayed, blackened and unrecognisable as having belonged to a human being, seeming to float in the gloom that was lit only by a few guttering candles; and for weeks afterward the head occupied my dreams, hanging bodilessly in a dark space that was at once remote and claustrophobic, like that inside a confessional box.

  You’d asked me about Confession, you were intrigued by the concept. You have to make what’s known as an examination of conscience, where you review the past week, and see what sins you might have committed, we used to go to weekly Confession back then, I said. What sort of sins? you said. Well, that I was disobedient to my parents, or that I stole something, or, when I was old enough to have them, that I had impure thoughts, thoughts about girls that is. And how old were you then? you said. Oh, you’d be surprised, Nina, you can have impure thoughts when you’re ten or eleven, maybe younger. And did you steal, Angel? Well, not much, I said, maybe I shoplifted a few sweets, that kind of thing, or I’d take a few coppers from my father’s pockets when he lay sleeping on the sofa after doing a night shift. What they call venial sins, that you don’t get sent to hell for, you only have to do time in purgatory, I said. But what if you didn’t commit any sins, what then? Oh, sometimes you made them up, I said, because if you said you hadn’t committed any sins since your last Confession, the priest would be reluctant to believe you, and he would say, Are you sure, my son? For instance, you wouldn’t have picked a fight with your brother or sister, or you wouldn’t have been tempted to steal an orange or an apple from a greengrocer’s display, when no one was looking, or maybe you’d be reading one of your mother’s magazines, and you’d see a picture of a woman, and you’d have impure thoughts about that woman, the priest would say, and you’d think about it? And you would say, Maybe I did, Father, because it was entirely possible that you would do such a thing, or think such a thing, and the priest would give a little sigh of satisfaction, and say, Ah, I thought so, my son, we’re none of us perfect, and then he’d absolve you from this imagined sin, I said. But that’s bizarre, Angel, you said, it’s like something out of Kafka. Oh, don’t knock it, Nina, I said, it was a good exercise in contemplation, good exercise for the memory, trying to remember what you might or might not have done in the course of that week, reliving those dubious encounters with oranges and apples and women’s magazines. And it did teach you to examine your conscience, to realise that everything you do, every decision you make, every thought, or every thought you imagined you’d had, or might be tempted to have in the future, is important, that it is judged by some absolute standard of morality. That anyone can be guilty of something, if one looks hard enough at oneself. It taught you to know yourself, I said.

  I say this now, Nina, knowing how I judged you, you whom I once thought wholly guilty, and yet I still don’t know who you are, Nina, and that is why I still love you. I know I might have pictured you wrongly in the past, and you must forgive me for trying to picture what you might have become, imagining what experiences have lined your face, and where, whether the creases in the forehead, the wrinkles at the corners of the eyes and mouth, what weight you might have put on, and how it might suit you. I need to hold on to some picture of you, even as I know I might be wrong. And when sometimes, leafing through a history of costume or a vintage fashion magazine, I picture you in this outfit or that, dressing you like a doll in eighteenth-century petticoats and flounces, or in an elaborate Japanese kimono, or a 1920s coat and dress ensemble of Art Deco printed silk, you must forgive me for that too, as you must forgive me for sometimes picturing you naked, for you must have known in advance that such thoughts would occur to me, and you must have allowed for that, when you entered into correspondence with me again, with your full knowledge and complete consent, just three months ago, though it seems a lifetime. I think we should spend some time away from each other, you said, the second-last time we met face to face. It was June 1984. We’d just come back from a weekend in London where we’d quarrelled endlessly, you remember, it began when we went to the National Gallery, I expressly wanted to look again at Titian’s The Death of Actaeon, a painting I’d always loved. The narrative that lies behind the picture, as I recounted it to you, is Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

  Ovid begins by telling the outcome of the story first, as if as
suming it to be already familiar to his audience – this is the story of Actaeon, he says, upon whose brow strange horns appeared, and whose dogs greedily lapped their master’s blood. And if you look for the truth of the matter, you will find it in the fault of fortune, and not in any crime of his, says Ovid. Anyway, Actaeon and his comrades have been hunting since dawn. It’s high noon, and their nets are dripping with their quarry’s blood, says Ovid, so they call it a day.

  Then he cuts to another scene, to a beautiful grotto with a stream, and a waterfall, where Diana, the goddess of the woods, is wont to bathe after hunting. On this particular day she’s just come back from the chase, and she lets herself be divested by her nymphs of her robe, her spear, her quiver, and her unstrung bow. And while the nymphs are pouring water over her naked body from big Grecian urns, Actaeon has lost his way, wandering through the unfamiliar woods with unsure footsteps, as Ovid has it. And he enters the grotto, covered in spray from the waterfall, whereupon the nymphs begin to beat their breasts and scream at the sight of him, and they crowd around Diana, trying to hide her body with their own, but Diana stands head and shoulders above them, and her cheeks are as red as the rosy dawn as she stands in full view without her robes. And not having her bow and arrow to hand, she dips her hand into the stream, and throws water into Actaeon’s face, and says to him, Now you can tell everybody that you saw Diana naked – if you can tell.

  And, though he doesn’t know it yet, horns begin to sprout on Actaeon’s head, his arms become legs, and his hands feet, his clothes and his skin turn into a spotted hide. Then she puts fear into his heart, and he begins to run, wondering why he has become so swift of foot. And then he sees himself reflected in a pool, he sees the stag’s head, and the horns, and he tries to speak, but all that comes out is a groan. What can he do now? For though he’s got the body of a stag, he’s still got the mind of a man, and he’s thinking, I can’t very well go back to my palace now, I’d be too ashamed, but then again, I’d be very afraid if I stayed out here in the woods. So he’s standing there dithering when his sees his dogs running towards him – Ovid’s got these great names for the dogs, Nina, I said, like Hunter, Fury, Barker, Growler, Gazelle, Catcher, Gnasher, Spot, Runner, Soot, Whirlwind, Wolf, and so on – and he starts to run, the whole pack chasing him, and he wants to cry out, I’m Actaeon, I’m your master! but no words will come, and then the lead dog sinks his teeth into his shoulder, and the rest of the pack pours onto him, tearing at him till his whole body is one great wound, and the worst thing is, his comrades have got wind of what’s going on, they catch up with the dogs and urge them on, all the time shouting for Actaeon, and complaining that he’s missing all the action, and Actaeon lets a groan out of him, not quite a human cry, not quite the cry of a deer, and then he dies.

  There was a lot of debate after the event, says Ovid, some saying that Diana was more cruel than she was just, others saying that when it comes to defending one’s virginity, strong measures are needed; and both sides had their arguments well marshalled. But as for Ovid himself, he says the whole thing was just an unfortunate accident, that Actaeon was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, I said.

  And what do you think, Angel? you said. Oh, I don’t know, I said, but it would seem that the gods, or the goddesses, have as little control over circumstances as human beings, and as little control over their passions. I prefer to look at the painting, I said. By now we were standing before Titian’s Death of Actaeon. It’s a big painting, almost six feet by six and a half, and I had stood before it alone many times, imagining myself to enter the dark wood of its landscape, never fully able to resolve its blurs and ambiguities. In a significant departure from the Ovid story, Titian shows Diana present at Actaeon’s metamorphosis, standing in the left foreground, almost life-size, holding a bow which lacks a string. It’s as if she’s part of the action, and yet not, I said, maybe she’s a projection of herself, or maybe Actaeon’s fate is her dream. At any rate, Titian made a lot of changes to the painting, and some people think it’s unfinished. It’s an autumnal painting, all those sepias and russets, the leaves of the trees beginning to turn. Maybe the unfinished look is the point. The dogs especially, the way they emerge out of a flurry of brushstrokes, made up of contradictory layers of paint. They’re a series of afterthoughts, a kind of ongoing process. You know, Nina, The Death Of Actaeon is always at the back of my mind, I carry it around in my mind, but I can never see it clearly enough, it shimmers and changes as I try to imagine it. And when I go to see it for real, like now, I realise that even then I can’t see it clearly enough, it’s as if the painting has changed since I last saw it. And every time I look at it, I see things I never saw before. Or maybe I did see them, but never noticed them. Maybe I’ve forgotten seeing them, I said.

  So the painting’s really about your own thought processes, you said. Well, I hadn’t thought of it that way, Nina, but maybe it is, I said. But then it would seem to exclude whatever I might think of it, you said. I mean, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to you that it might mean something different to me. Well, you didn’t venture to tell me, Nina, I said. And you didn’t venture to ask, you said. You were too busy with your own analysis, your self-analysis. But you might as well know that in 1965, just after my mother died, they brought us to the National Gallery on a school trip, I was fifteen, remember? And Titian wasn’t really on the agenda, we were going to look at the Rembrandts, the self-portraits, and we were just passing the Actaeon en route, when it caught my eye, and I stopped and looked at it. Maybe I only stopped for a few minutes, they had to send someone back for me, I don’t know how long I looked at it. But I could see my mother in the Diana figure, the way she held herself with such disinterested aplomb, such gravity. And afterwards, when I read up on the background, the painting seemed more than ever to be about what can happen between men and women, when they stumble on some terrible revelation about the other. I could see the story of my mother and father in Titian’s painting, you said. But it was your mother who suffered most, not your father, I said. How do you know? you said. Who are you to say who suffered most? I prefer to think of her as being empowered by her death. Like Diana, unleashing the invisible arrow. The Death of Actaeon means something to me, Angel, but all it is to you is a talking-point, a conversation piece. And you carry a picture of it around in your head for years, you weigh its pros and cons, never arriving at any conclusions. You’re very good at pictures, Angel, you picture this, you picture that, but it really hasn’t much to do with the real world, has it? Art, for you, is a little safe haven. Like your father’s beloved Esperanto, a cosy little back room where a dozen or so oddballs talk about changing the world, when they all know the whole thing was doomed to failure about fifty years ago, it’s all cloud-cuckoo-land. Don’t you think you’re like that, Angel, like your holier-than-thou father, ever so slightly pompous, with your useless pictures of the world? you said, and I was taken aback that you should speak of my father in this way.

  And you, I suppose you’re going to change the world? I said. Nobody changes the world, you said, history isn’t a matter of personalities, of kings and statesmen making the big decisions, history’s the manufacture of consent. That’s what MO2 does, we’re in the Chinese whispers game. But at least I’ve no illusions about it. I consent to it. And I take pleasure in what I do, because I like to create beautiful things, you said. Isn’t that what I do? I said. No, you said, you think your pleasure is morality, you think you’re better than the next person because you can appreciate something they can’t. And you’ve made a picture of me, Angel, you carry it around in your mind like an icon, and for all I know you might adore it, but it’s the wrong picture, Gabriel, it’s not me. It’s a kind of fake, you said, and I’m tired of tramping around galleries looking at pictures with you, be they real or fake, and with that you turned on your heel and left.

  We made it up a little afterwards, when I came back to the hotel room and found you were wearing L’Heure Bleue, as if to remind me of our ti
me in Paris, or to remind yourself of our time in Paris. But it began again in Belfast, or rather it ended in Belfast. We’d gone out for dinner, to Restaurant 77, the best restaurant in town, it was your idea. The condemned man’s last meal. Afterwards, we were, as I thought, about to get a taxi to your place when you said, I think we should stop seeing each other for a while. What do you mean, stop seeing each other? I said. It was a circumstance I had never envisaged. Oh, I knew we had had our difficulties, but they consisted of mere ideological differences, easily resolved, and this struck me like a bolt from the blue. You were silent for a moment. What do you mean, stop seeing each other? I said again, less confidently this time. Yes, Angel, maybe if we stop seeing each other we’ll learn to see each other better. We both need a little time and space away from each other, you said.

  I felt as if my world had turned upside down. You can’t mean it, Nina, I said. You mean everything to me, I said. I can’t live without you, I said. How can you say that, I said, after all we’ve done together, after all we’ve said to each other, you said you loved me, I said. We say a lot of things, Angel, and they’re true for when we say them, but things change, you said. But it’s not over, is it, Nina? It can’t be over, you’ll come back to me, won’t you? Give me some hope that you’ll come back, Nina, I said. Oh, Angel, I don’t know my own mind at the moment, I live in hope as much as you, don’t press me too hard, you said. And I said more, and you said more, and I could not change your mind. I have to leave now, you said. You’ll be in touch? I said. I’ll write, you said. You kissed me gently on the cheek, and left me.

  When I woke the next morning I thought it had all been a bad dream, and when I realised you had indeed said what you said, I felt bereaved. I had not felt like this since the death of my mother, nor would I feel like that again until the death of my father. And, remembering that time, I am writing now with a funereal black Waverley pen made in the 1920s, whose unusual spear-shaped nib has a teardrop vent-hole. Like the Dutch pens, the Merlin and the CIBA that I used to describe our happier times, the Waverley had never been inked until it came to my hands. It is like new, this pen that is almost as old as my father was when he died.