Jeremy knew that at this moment he was looking at himself.
“HOW TRANQUIL everything is becoming,” said Emily wistfully. “Spring was never one of my favourite seasons. These playful breezes annoy me. What has happened to the wind? We could go back to winter if you like.”
“I like spring,” said Arianna, “at least I like what I can remember of it from before him. Some of the girls from the factory would go out walking in the afternoon on Sundays, along the embankment or to the park. And when I was a little girl I loved spring. I remember birds from then, and daffodils. After him I couldn’t seem to bring the seasons into focus … or anything else that happened regularly, predictably: days of the week, holidays, mealtimes. All that seemed to be gone, after him, because his unpredictability became my reality.” Arianna looked straight ahead, right across the valley. She crossed her thin, translucent arms. “I suppose I should have liked spring when I was ballooning … it was the easiest time.”
“I think my early interest in the Arctic must have had something to do with my dislike of spring, my love of winter. You see,” Emily was incandescent with enthusiasm for her chosen season, “much more is happening in the winter. It is a more active state. None of this slow, practically imperceptible growth, this steady, dogged unfolding. The wind attacks everything around it, it makes instant contact, it changes the landscape in a great big hurry. A blizzard changes everything. It’s as if it cares about the landscape so much it simply has to touch it recklessly, has to fling itself upon it. Inappropriately sometimes, yes, but always fearlessly. Passionately. None of this gentle, sentimental coaxing.” Emily looked indignantly towards some cowslips growing nearby. “Aren’t they a bit much, don’t you think? They positively scream, See how sweet I am! I’m a flower! I’m a flower!”
Arianna examined the little blossoms thinking that, yes, they were sweet and they were flowers.
“You’re just like my sister Charlotte,” said Emily. “She would write something ridiculous about those flowers I’m sure. Anne would have, too.” She paused and eyed Arianna closely. “As a matter of fact you are quite a lot like Charlotte. Proficient at pining, wanting to haunt, and all that.” Emily laughed. “You should have seen him. Nothing resembling a perfect profile there.”
“Was Charlotte in love?” asked Arianna, surprised. She had already heard quite a lot about the famous Charlotte, about the huge numbers of books that she had sold, about her desperate desire to please, socially. About her exhausting trips to London, and, in conjunction with these, about Emily’s utter refusal to have anything to do with the place. Literati, she had sniffed. Hrumph!
Emily was not answering, but she had stopped laughing.
“Well, was she in love?”
Emily winced. “I don’t really like to think about it.”
“Oh … please tell me.”
“It was …” Emily began, “pathetic. He was her teacher, she actually called him her master. This was in Belgium. I hated it there.”
“You were in Belgium? It isn’t possible. You could never have been anywhere but right here. I can’t even imagine you in that parlour we haunted, or in that kitchen. I’ve been all over the sky, but I’ve never been to Belgium.”
“We went to school there, Charlotte and I, for a while; she for a longer period than me. I came back as soon as possible, but Charlotte stayed on, as a teacher. It was awful. She wasn’t very large to begin with and she just got smaller and smaller in all sorts of different ways. His name was Monsieur Heger.”
“Did he seduce her? Did he love her?”
“Absolutely not. Oh, I think he admired her intelligence, but, good heavens, he was married and had a hundred children. Not that that matters, God knows. And there was something else; I think he was interested in his own power over her. She would have done anything to please him. He must have known that.”
“He must have known that,” said Arianna, trailing off into her own past.
“Finally, she came home defeated and then began the worst part of all.”
“The worst part of all,” echoed Arianna, slowly re-entering the subject.
“The waiting … the waiting for the letter. She had written to him, you see, and he hadn’t replied, so she was always waiting. She only spoke about it once but I could feel, first the anticipation, and then this desperate waiting. It went on for years. After about six months I began to wait for the letter, too, even though I knew it would never, never come. Charlotte wrote to him again and again. I could tell by her face peering down at the paper that that’s what she was doing. I began to imagine what might be in his letter if it did come. The unwritten paragraphs haunted me – not because I wanted it to arrive but just because it never did. In fact I wanted it not to arrive because I knew about Charlotte’s capacity for suffering. The arrival of that letter could guarantee her ten more years of agony. She said that she wanted very little from him; a sort of intellectual correspondence, so she said. Of course, she was lying. What she really wanted from him was pain, deceit, secrecy, mystery, and darkness. And that was the announcement that the letter would contain regardless of what the words said. That was what he was withholding from her. Not simple friendship.
“You should have seen her wait … it became her employment … exhausting work. She waited all night long, awake, asleep. She waited for the kettle to boil in the morning but she was really waiting for a non-existent piece of paper to arrive. When she was waiting for Branwell to come home from the pub at night she was waiting for the letter to arrive. While she waited for Papa’s long sermons to end she waited for the letter to begin. She waited for a cake to rise but she was really waiting for the letter to appear magically in the little silver tray that sat on the hall table.”
“He never sent me any messages,” said Arianna, “not even a postcard. I never saw the word love written by his hand.”
“You were never apart … how could he? But”-a mysterious look entered Emily’s eyes – “don’t worry about that, he will send you messages now. He probably already has.”
“Oh? is that because he’s dead? Let’s haunt him. Let’s read the messages.”
“No.”
“Why is it that you are all in favour of haunting places, but people are somehow out of bounds?”
“Places are much more satisfactory.”
“For you.”
Emily ignored this last comment. “I thought I should go mad if Charlotte didn’t stop waiting,” she continued. “The arrival of the post was the most excruciating time of the day. Anything for me? she would ask lightly, and there often was something for her, she had girlfriends who wrote hundreds of long, tedious letters. She would sift eagerly through the envelopes and gradually a puzzled look would come over her face when she discovered no Belgian stamps – as if she were confused about the fact that, on the four hundredth and seventy-third consecutive day, there was still no word from him. I couldn’t bear it. I, you see, had begun, not only to mentally write, but to visually construct this vagrant missive. I was certain it would be written on blue paper and that the ink would be black, the stamp cancelled in a fuzzy unreadable way. I began to wonder if I were in love with this Monsieur Heger whose presence I had been barely able to tolerate while I was in Belgium.”
“But Emily, you said you were never in love.”
“I wasn’t … and I wasn’t then either. I was deeply attracted, however, to this darkness, this deception that Charlotte wanted, though she probably didn’t even know that she wanted it. I was attracted to the conflagration and the charred ruins that she unwittingly desired. I suppose I wanted them too.
“I remember one day when waiting and wanting hung all around the house like blue smoke. The post had come into and out of this blue mist almost unnoticed because, by now, the waiting had become an ordinary state, like breathing. The arrival of a letter into the lungs of the house at this stage would have been impossible, suffocating, no … more like choking or strangling. It simply could not happen and so, although w
e still waited all the time for the letter, we no longer looked for it. Yes, by then, the waiting had taken us over completely. It had invaded every corner of the house, this blue smoke, as if it were evidence, a reminder of a conflagration that had never happened. Then, quite suddenly, in the midst of kneading some dough in the kitchen, dough that looked blue because of the smoke I’ve been describing, I felt cold, apart, the outside edges of my soul registering an absence, and I knew I was waiting all alone.”
“What had happened?” asked Arianna, appalled.
“Charlotte had stopped waiting. She’d started writing.”
“Not another letter.”
“A kind of letter, yes, I suppose it was, in a way, a kind of letter to him. But it didn’t matter any more whether or not he received it. And it mattered even less that he would never respond. The book made her famous. There was lots of fire in it and some wonderful charred ruins.”
“And what about you … did you stop waiting?”
“Not for a long, long time. I sat, awake, near my window at night and waited and waited. Not for a letter any more but for something else, unnameable. I wrote a lot of poetry and watched winter. I courted desire, alone, by the window. And once it all became mine: all the wanting and waiting and impossible conflagrations and terrifying vast charred ruins, I became quite happy. It was pride of ownership, I suspect.”
Emily turned her gauzy back and floated down the valley. She pivoted once and called to Arianna in a hollow, confident voice, “Yes, I was, I was really quite content.”
CONSIDER A MAN who is trying to write a letter he does not wish to write. Almost any other task will suffice for him at such a time: paying taxes, taking the car in for its twenty-thousand-mile check-up, cleaning out his desk drawers, walking a dog that has not seen a leash for two years, reading books of no interest, developing personal relationships with the intellectually limited students that fill his lecture halls.
But then consider a man who is trying not to write a letter that he honestly believes he does not wish to write. This is more difficult because he must spend at least some of his time convincing himself that he really has no wish to write it: a complicated activity that involves thinking about what he would say if he were to write the letter he really does not wish to write. And when he is not composing in this manner it is necessary for him to discover the whereabouts of the object of the composition. For if he does not have all those facts gathered together, postal codes and, probably, air mail rates and the proper stationery, he can never be entirely sure that it is lack of desire that prevents the writing of the letter and not something external, such as lack of the necessary information and/or equipment.
It is not difficult for Arthur Woodruff to obtain Ann’s new address. He teaches, after all, at the same university from which she has taken her leave of absence. It takes him two or three weeks, however, to admit that she is no longer on the premises and another two or three weeks to inquire, casually, where she has gone. Once the fact of her journey has been digested, the possibility of the letter becomes more real and his aversion to writing it more pronounced. He really does not want to communicate with her in any way, feels nothing but utter gratitude for her absence. Nevertheless, he finds himself standing in the English Department subtly requesting her address at the end of a conversation involving at least five or six other, unrelated subjects.
After he has written the strange English postal directions in his small address book-in pencil, in case he might feel the urge to erase them-he feels more settled, relaxed. All is as it should be. He knows exactly where she is and therefore he can be more specific about where he does not wish any correspondence of his to be sent. Then he engages himself in a regular flurry of letter-writing. He writes to women he hasn’t seen in ten years, to an Eagle Scout he admired as a boy, to his mother’s Italian cousins in the Abruzzi, to his now-retired thesis adviser at the distant university, to little-known colleagues all over the world. He writes a few letters to the editors of the three city newspapers concerning pertinent social and environmental issues. He writes to his local member of parliament regarding a proposed change in the zoning by-law in his city neighbourhood. He writes to a Canadian artist whom he does not know, but whose show he has recently seen, to tell him that he thinks his realist paintings are brilliant and moving. He sends each of his three children and his wife affectionate, mildly humorous cards with teddy bears printed on them. Finally, he joins Amnesty International and writes polite, firm letters to various corrupt dictators all over South America.
After a week of this he returns with relief to Tintoretto. His paper on the Ultima Cena finished, he allows himself the pleasure of reading and writing about the two cycles of paintings in the Scuola San Rocco: his real loves, the objects of his true desires. Saints and devils and prophets and apostles. Christ in various stages of perpetual agony. Lightning, thunder, gesture, and the complicated folds of vibrant drapery.
And angels. From now until the end of term, he decides, he will spend his time counting and describing angels. He begins with those who figure in The Brazen Serpent, the first painting to be completed by Tintoretto in the upper hall of the Scuola. Arthur is delighted by the maelstrom of angels surrounding God the Father in the upper part of this painting. They are urging their deity, encouraging him to pay attention to what is taking place below him. And they themselves are either part of, or playing with one of the most dangerous clouds Tintoretto ever invented – a true thunderhead. This mass of wispy drapery, solid cloud, beating wings, and turmoil could not possibly be a comforting sight on any horizon. There are no fewer than twelve angels fighting for space inside this cumulous formation and Arthur is fond of every one of them, knows their physical characteristics as well as if they had all played on the same football team, shared the same locker rooms. As if he has been involved in skirmishes with them, has tumbled with them over rough earth, has held their muscular bodies close to his in the heat of leaping victory. “The angels in this painting,” he writes, “are filled with energy, vitality. They burst down from above in a state of positive turmoil which echoes the more negative chaos that is taking place on the earth below.”
There are thirteen baby angels in The Assumption of the Virgin, one of the eight paintings that occupy the ground floor of the Scuola, thirteen putti forming a nebula, the nucleus of which is the rising Virgin. How wonderfully strange they look … like some kind of unidentifiable insect with wings for ears and no thorax or abdomen at all. Their wings, Arthur concludes, would not beat or fan the air like those of their adult cousins; rather they would whir like the wings of hummingbirds. Because of this the whole painting seems to vibrate slightly, as though the Virgin is being helicoptered into space.
While Arthur looks at the small reproductions of the enormous paintings, and turns occasionally to write his thoughts about them on clean white sheets of paper, the Canadian spring is making its muddy statement outside his windows. Banks of snow are leaving behind winter refuse, gutters run, and a robin hops on newly emerged grass. Arthur, lost in crowds of angels, notices none of this, keeps time by his desk calendar, by the knowledge that it takes him five or six days to feel he has satisfied his curiosity about certain sets of angels. By the time he has finished with these and has begun to consider the personalities of the angels that God and Tintoretto have chosen to play starring roles, the ones that make important announcements or take CARE packages to the desert, it is the middle of April. He is no longer lecturing. There is a plane ticket to Italy on his desk.
He is surprised by a mild breeze creeping through a crack under his window while he is gazing into the soft face of the devil-angel in the Temptation of Christ in the Desert. There is this fragile moving air, and then the delicate pink that clothes the creature’s wings. Almost absently, Arthur reaches for the airmail stationery that has been pushed by angels to the farthest corner of the desk.
On one thin sheet of onionskin he writes:
“I am going to Venice for one week …
alone.” He folds it, unsigned, into the miraculously addressed envelope.
He is certain, as he walks towards the corner, that he will never post the letter.
THE MORNING cat has caught a bird – an English robin deafened by wind and busy with worms in the little rocky garden.
The feline has begun the day early; leaving the stone barn that is his home and meandering slowly through the village, investigating garbage, sitting for a while, placidly in the low sun, sheltered by a drystone wall. He steps carefully around the edge of roadside puddles and walks fastidiously away from the ever-present animal excrement on the streets. He is aware of sleep breaking open to wakefulness in any number of the cottages whose foundations he skirts; still he struts Slowly by, uninterested. He freezes once and stares down one of his brothers who is working the opposite side of the street. Both animals bristle briefly, hold the pose and, then, as if by mutual agreement, turn and walk arrogantly away; a contest of power that each of them believes he has won.
When he reaches Ann’s cottage he is mildly annoyed to discover no one stirring, the soft cloud of deep morning dreams drifting as surely as an aroma through the outside walls. He leaps up to the ledge of the kitchen window, brushing his fur against the cool glass, looking into the dim, unlit interior. His tail flicks back and forth through an assault of wind. He turns and sees the two bottles of milk on the stoop, left by an even earlier creature: the milkman. The cat’s breakfast is being kept from him by glass – glass and sleep.
Hearing self-confident, directed footsteps on the walk, the cat takes no time to look but jumps silently from the sill and hides behind the garbage pail that he knows, from previous morning excursions, to be tightly sealed. As the crunch of gravel grows quiet and quieter and finally fades, the cat walks coolly across the path where he watches with restrained curiosity as the wind picks up a blue envelope that has been left on the stoop and sends it flying towards the little garden where its journey is halted by the bare thin arms of a rose bush. It twitches there like something alive, something the cat might like to play with. His attention is divided, however, for at this exact moment he becomes aware of indoor activity, the creak of casual steps on stairs, and clamorous goings-on in the coal cellar. There will, he knows, be a saucer for him soon, but this struggle of wind, branch, and paper interests him. He begins to amble towards it; the centre part of his body sways slightly. It is then that he spots the preoccupied bird.
Changing Heaven Page 19