Now the line comes into Clare’s head, not as bravery, but as gratitude, as she sits beside her daughter all those days in intensive care and watches the nursing being offered. A commercial kindness, such as you fear Blanche will not find, but not less valuable for that. Intensive care it is; there is one nurse for every patient. In ways the room has a medieval air, if you can ignore the technology, which is so huge and complicated and intrusive and incomprehensible that ignoring it is the best thing to do with it. But the medieval air comes from the silent and monastic way the nurses stand at large sloping lecterns, double folio size, and make notes, recording every detail of their own particular patient’s condition.
Recording. Clare sits and holds her drugged-out sleeping daughter’s hand. She considers the possibility that this is death, after death, the last judgment, and this place is God’s anteroom, and these his angels, recording all the good and bad of the person’s life. Any moment now St Michael will come in with the scales. The angels wear simple white robes, their voices are soft, their gaze serene but penetrating, their smiles gentle, their demeanour strict. You can’t guess from their expressions the import of their recordings. And you can’t tell from looking at the charts, except that they are detailed and highly complicated. Dozens of columns, ruled off into hundreds of little boxes. With figures, and letters, and percentages, and fractions. It’s a code that only angels know.
You could suppose, from the way they look at the patients, and the tender manner in which they speak to them, that the news is going to be good, that it is going to be heaven and not hell, but Clare suspects that this is their nature. Being angels, this is the way they behave.
Just as the devils, their fallen siblings, must behave badly, must burn and trick and cheat.
But the angels did keep her company in that valley. Did aid her coming back.
She’s never had any illusions about nurses, that they are particularly good people. They’re a bunch of employees like any other, pleasant, nasty, friendly, mean, thin, fat, rude, polite. But the ones in intensive care do seem particularly gifted with kindness. They seem able to treat their charges with real affection. The kindness of strangers is not a phrase of almost unbearable sadness, in this context.
Maybe it is the journey they make together, that journey whose every breath is encoded on the double folios of their lecterns.
At the darkest time she was hooked up to:
7 intravenous drip machines electronically dosing her with drugs
1 cannula into a vein
1 cannula into an artery
a bundle of lines through her neck to her heart
These lines, plus:
a sphygmomanometer sleeve
a finger splint
electrocardiograph discs
producing
7 different coloured graph lines and numbers on a computer screen for monitoring heart rate, oxygen saturation, pulse, etcetera
a ventilator with a black rubber mask
a catheter for urine, collected in a sealed calibrated plastic box
a drain for the stomach, collecting blood and fluids in a calibrated soft plastic bulb
Was that all? It’s all that Clare recalls.
On her fifth day in intensive care, her daughter is sitting in a chair. It’s Sunday, only one other patient in the large light room. His curtains are drawn, something’s being done to him. Sorry darling, says the invisible nurse.
Sorry darling, repeats her daughter in quite a scornful voice. That’s what they say when they pierce some painful part of your anatomy. Sorry darling, as they amputate some limb or other.
Clare sniggers quietly, lengthily, behind her hand. She’s not sure she should let her daughter see how sweet she finds this scorn.
Don’t think that watching television will take your mind off your troubles. On the television women lift their faces and cry with their mouths open and their eyes shut. Their hands fall away, they are on their knees, they weep and howl with this blind anguish that still lifts their faces to where heaven might be, but where certainly the camera is. The camera stares coldly at them. Doesn’t even shake. Maybe this is the sign of the indifferent universe. God is dead, and so is the eye of the camera.
It is Bosnia and the war, Turkey and the earthquake, Peru and the mud-slide, China and the flood, Papua New Guinea and the tidal wave. And in all of these the women lift up their faces and weep to the unloving gaze of the camera. They weep for their lost loved ones, their husbands, their children. The pain is unbearable, but it doesn’t care, it still has to be borne.
The camera records this unbearable bearing. And the world in whatever safety it has at home watches and measures and grieves, recognises its luck, turns away its eyes.
Clare wonders about the duty of looking. Should she take account of their pain, record it with her own eyes, or turn them away. But her not looking doesn’t save their grief from violation. The camera has already seen, already stolen.
In the mall Clare stops to look at the fountain. At right angles to it is a bench, on which a man is sitting, a burly man with matted hair. He is rocking backwards and forwards, with a strict and regular rhythm, as though obeying a metronome in his head. And as he rocks, so precisely keeping time, he is saying something in a slow mumbling monotone, taking its emphasis not from the sense of the words but from his metrical movement. It takes her a while to puzzle out the words. I am not lonely, he is saying. I am not lonely.
Since Geoffrey died Clare has had to rethink the scales of things. It’s changed, the whole gamut has been extended. There are lower registers, and higher ones. One result is how trivial some things seem. A book lost. A precious pot broken. The car that they loved because of all the places it had taken them, sold. A friend visiting from New Zealand when Clare will be in Tasmania so she won’t get to see her. The lavatory leaking. The dying of an old prunus tree—or was it poisoned, by the neighbour who claimed it dropped messes on his drive?—whose veils of pale pink blossom made beautiful the spring, whose tart fruits were excellent in pies; these for the neighbour were messes. All these disasters have shrunk, are so low down on the scale of significance you can hardly give them head room. What’s the loss of his dear old car compared to the loss of its driver? She remembers her father talking about the scheme of things, how our lives are not very grand in the scheme of things; that is how she feels about things that once would have troubled her. At the same time as she knows her loss as so enormous in this scheme of things. And if minor anguishes are low down in a scale that has the beloved’s death as its point of reference, still that is not the end of the gamut either. It’s as though it has not just stretched, but skewed. As though the weights have changed: maybe a pound of lead is heavier than a pound of feathers.
All the scales we keep separate in our heads at once. St Michael weighing souls in scales and finding them wanting. Last judgment, final reckoning. Scales falling from eyes, suddenly peeled bare, which is supposed to be a good thing, to mean enlightenment, but may in certain cases mean the witnessing of things better not seen, never seen or known, which is why the women caught in that cruel and never turning away cold camera eye close theirs even as they raise them to heaven. What dizzy heights, depths, lengths have their gamuts stretched to? They hood their eyes, but you can never unsee. Naked eyes hurt. But covering them is no protection.
Scales, ranges, registers. There is even a scale for measuring ripeness. A kind of hydrometer, called Baume, after the French chemist who invented it. Used to measure grape sugar, through an associated scale of relative density. The answer is given as degrees Baume. She and Geoffrey tried to make wine out of the mulberries on their disappointing tree, once. They measured the ripeness of the brew on a Baume scale. The wine was horrible, it wouldn’t ferment properly, they had to add yeast, and lemon because it lacked acidity; it became terribly alcoholic and disgustingly flavourless. But measuring the ripeness was fun, and so was watching the would-be wine bubble up in an elegant little glass airlock, a pretty device of blown bulbs an
d pipes.
Imagine death measuring lives on a Baume scale: ripeness is all, you’re ready to die now. But if that’s the case, death’s scale isn’t one the rest of us can read.
And you can’t measure grief. The scales of the last judgment are supernatural. Are a metaphor. An allegory, a parable, an emblem. All devices to understand and explain. What you want is not measurement, but kindness. Comfort. Forgiveness. Not your soul against a feather, but the everlasting arms. Or human ones. Tracing their patterns of love on your willing skin.
Turn off the television. Shrink its disasters to a pinpoint on a black screen. Read a wise book and lay its balm on your soul. Things are the sons of heaven, said Samuel Johnson, words are the daughters of earth. The sons have been waxing terrible in their aspect, maybe the daughters will be kinder. She calls on them in her hour of need, and they come.
the unquiet grave
CLARE DRIVES HOME FROM THE hospital in that careful, conscious manner that is necessary to re-enter the world. After five hours visiting in limbo. Comfortable enough, but you go glassy-eyed. This mixture of fear and boredom, she told her daughter, you know the other thing it is like? A war. Being in a war. She puts the car radio on; some plaintive jazz is playing, and she thinks of changing over to Orpheus and Eurydice on CD. When Geoffrey was alive she liked to listen to words on the radio, to have people telling her things. Now it is music. She leaves the jazz on, it is like languid fingers stroking her skin. It makes her remember lying on a bed, feeling her body spread out and highly strung like that curious musical instrument the koto, while skilful fingers plucked from it taut erotic chords that resonated through its artful frame. Ah, that was then.
It’s Sunday, next weekend she will be in Tasmania, talking about Seduction and Betrayal. Geoffrey’s dying seems to have got her making public utterances about sex. Last year in Melbourne it was a panel called This obscure object . . . dot dot dot. She wanted them to talk about the kind of desire that art creates as longing for itself. Like Lucia di Lammermoor and the lines of melody that weave your heartstrings into their own hopeless passion, but oh what pleasure, it’s almost too much to bear. Or The Pearl Fishers. But everyone else on the panel talked about sex: about copulation really. And the week after Tasmania she could be sitting on the stage of the booked-out Melbourne town hall talking to Isabel Allende about Lust and Food. But she said no. She’s not such a fan of Allende’s.
She stops off at the shops and buys a great quantity of cat food, a lettuce, a courgette and a bottle of wine. You can see who eats in our house, she says to the man at the checkout. Always the cat, he laughs.
It would be a crisis indeed, a stroppy cat and nothing to feed her. A human can always find something.
At home she mooches about wondering what to do in that moment before all the things that have to be done, all that has been neglected, start clamouring at her. She rushes round doing the noisiest, then pours a glass of wine. Her daughter said there’s nothing on the telly. Ballykissangel. Repeats. She can’t bear watching it now they’ve killed off Assumpta so brutally, so cheating, so callous and calculated. Just as she was about to find love in the arms of her priest—and she hadn’t even kissed him, they’d just circled one another in an erotic tension for however many episodes—they made her electrocute herself. It killed your faith in the narrative, as well as its heroine.
She switches to SBS. Something about Evita Peron. When she died the streets were banked with great stiff shields of flowers, like targets. Half million lips kissed her coffin, four people dropped dead, hundreds fainted. There were 20,000 requests that she be made a saint.
The film showed footage of her speaking to the people, massive crowds, pullulating as far as the camera could see, and the increasingly frail Evita drawing their adoration from them. Clare never saw Madonna in the musical, though she tries to picture that healthy gym-strapping girl playing this woman whose death is already carving the beautiful bones of her face, with her great conscious eyes showing that they know it.
Her husband orders her body to be embalmed. It takes months. At first we see her lying, hands clasped, nails long and red in the black and white image of the film. She left instructions to her manicurist to take this off and paint them with colourless Revlon. Her body is dipped in acetate. It takes a year. At the end the crowds pay homage in a torchlight procession. The doctor worries about a spark setting the corpse on fire; it would burn like a torch, would be utterly consumed.
If Evita had been alive she would have saved her people; so much had she made them love her they believed that. But Peron is deposed. Her body falls into the hands of the enemy. Is it really her? Or is she wax? They cut off a piece of her ear, sever a finger. No, it really is Eva, complete with internal organs. She’s not just literally flammable, she’s potentially a political flame to set the country alight.
The new regime is determined to erase Peronism. A henchman shoots up the glass coffin in which she is sealed. She’s stuffed in a wooden crate and kidnapped. A certain colonel, says the programme, was custodian of her body; a perfectly normal man, but with the body he went mad. She was a doll. Intact. As if alive. Not wax. Flesh and bones.
It’s sex and death again. Ever since Geoffrey began dying the world has offered her shapely intricate narratives of sex and death. They fall into her pen. They loop and spiral their frail elaborate structures round the central enormous fact of his death. To begin with she thought most of them were unpublishable. They pleased her because they showed her she wrote to understand, not to publish. When she mentioned this a friend said, Oh Clare, I’m sure you won’t have any trouble, in the long run, I’m sure somebody will publish them, sooner or later.
No, she said, it’s not a publisher, it’s me that says they’re unpublishable. It’s to do with betrayal. They betray not just me, but other people.
But time passed, things change, all writers are tarts in the end, she knows now she will let them go, send them out, after all. She has gained enough self-knowledge in the past months to know that for her to write and to publish have become synonymous; that is why she does it. To understand, yes, but showing other people what she has understood is an integral part of it. The logical and only end of the process.
And one of the reasons is removed, which was keeping them secret from the lover’s wife. And the other . . . well, writers always, evidently and inevitably, betray themselves even more thoroughly than they do anyone else.
She emails the stories one by one in a slow narrative to Oliver, who writes to her every day. He is a wonderful reader, so perceptive, he tells her how the stories work, what’s in them, things that she didn’t know she was doing but is delighted to discover.
After she sent him the fifth one he wrote:
You asked whether I now saw why your stories are unpublishable. Yes and no. I see indeed why you might indeed think of them that way. But from the reader’s point of view they seem eminently publishable. I am aware, of course, of some of the things in them that are direct reflexions of autobiography. But I also know that they are largely fictional, and the uninstructed audience is going to have no reason to treat them, in their entirety, as anything other than imaginative fiction; there seems to me to be a seamless join between reality and imagination. (One could say exactly the same about Ulysses.) I can see no reason why a wider audience should not have the benefit of them when you are ready.
One of his charms is a habit of comparing her with James Joyce.
Maybe she’ll read one of them in Tasmania. Instead of writing a paper on Seduction and Betrayal. She wouldn’t do it at home, but here it may indeed be an uninstructed audience. She will read them The Sins of the Leopard, with its opening line from Dante:
That day they got no further with their reading. . .
Or maybe she won’t. Maybe she’ll get cold feet.
And meanwhile, what of Eva Peron?
It’s not really very nice having her standing around in this wooden crate, rough-looking thing, it could contain a batch
of garden rakes or ironing boards, and the colonel, what is the colonel doing? Something necrophiliac, we are obliged to suppose. Unspeakable, on the television.
The Pope takes a hand and she is turned into an Italian widow—we see her new name on a black coffin—and sent to Milan, where she is buried upright. The telly offers an image of a marble angel, pretty childish half-smiling decadent creature with a small swag of cobwebs suspended from her ear, across her cheek to her nose, it flutters gently as though she were breathing.
The programme is called The Unquiet Grave.
Time passes. The body is returned to Peron and his new wife. Peron and new wife return to Argentina. A miracle, Evita Peron is still intact, fifteen years later. A doll. Perfectly mummified.
The song ‘Living Doll’ runs through Clare’s head. What is Evita? A dead doll?
But Argentina isn’t a calm place. Evita may be suffering; the living certainly are. There are rumours that she has been abused, then decapitated. The doctor of the original embalming says not. Her sisters say she is mutilated, her nose broken, her head cut, that there’s tar on her feet. The images on television show this.
They get a museum restorer to repair her. This takes another year. Then in the dead of night they buried her, eight metres deep in a marble crypt. Still standing up, Clare wonders, whatever that means. Evita, maybe still miraculously perfect, nearly fifty years after her death.
Except, Clare knows, death is never perfect. It is always the absence of life. Geoffrey, newly dead, with his soul or his spirit, whatever you want to call it, his life, still hovering near, she could feel its energy, the gentle presence of it not in him but not far away, Geoffrey cooling was already not himself. Clare has conversations with her lovers, her ex-lovers, and her friends, about life after death. Most of them are not at all sanguine. Vague, doubtful, or certain not. She likes to think some spirit, some mind exists somewhere apart from their memories of him. But this preserving of a body which can do nothing but proclaim its deadness, its unaliveness, its absolute absence of life whatever orgasms a colonel could animate from it, is too sad to think of. Is immoral and obscene. A betrayal of the woman who once lived.
The Fog Garden Page 11