The Horned Man

by James Lasdun

  Nevertheless, I brought the poster home with me and threw it into the incinerator.

  After that I took my old prep school Latin dictionary down from its shelf in the living room and translated the note. At once I found my investigation (as it had unequivocally become by now) of Trumilcik lurching in an altogether unexpected direction.

  CHAPTER 8

  Watery, blinking eyes set in puffy tissue – too raw-looking and vulnerable to gaze at for long without discomfort. Thin, curving nose with scimitar-shaped nostrils. Mouth tight with old habits of suppression – frustration, disappointment, physical pain …

  Ill-at-ease in his life, one had to surmise; my father.

  A high street pharmacist’s son with intellectual pretensions, who’d left university after one year to take a pharmacy diploma and run the family business when his own father died.

  My mother was working behind the till: eighteen, with aspirations of her own.

  She was pregnant with me by the time my father realised how much he disliked standing in a white coat filling out prescriptions for the wheezing, flatulent, swollen-footed, styeeyed, hemorrhoidal denizens of Shepherd’s Bush. My mother urged him, so she claimed, to sell the business. ‘I wanted him to become a BOAC pilot,’ she told me, ‘but instead he had to make himself ill with that idiotic book of his.’

  Shortly after I was born, he had embarked on a History of Pharmacology, a magnum opus intended to spirit him out of the Goldhawk Road, that endless stretch of secondhand appliance shops and dismal pubs, into the fragrant cloisters of some venerable old university. Lacking what he called ‘formal discipline’ (a phrase my mother used to repeat with an inimitable mixture of piety and acid irony) he had quickly started floundering in the morass of his own research. But rather than give up, he had thrown himself into the task ever more obstinately, lashing himself into a daily foment of wasted effort. The picture my mother’s words conveyed was one of Sisyphean tragedy undercut by baleful pathos – an ambitious, untutored mind hammering at its limitations as if at the wall of its own skull, in the effort to turn the columns of books and notes rising around him like so many stalagmites, into a polished monument of erudition, such as he imagined the academic publishers he had his eye on might be impressed by. ‘Instead all he produced was a headache,’ my mother would conclude drily, ‘poor man.’

  As a matter of fact, she wasn’t entirely right. After his first bout with the brain tumor, he appeared to have made a strategic concession to mortality, turning some of his notes into self-contained articles and sending them out to learned journals. The mills of those organs grinding no doubt even more slowly than usual through his unaccredited submissions, he was dead by the time the editors of a couple of them informed him they would be pleased to carry his observations in future issues. But in this way his labors, which were no doubt all he would have cared to be remembered by, did at least come to fruition.

  And it was through these, too – these posthumously published articles – that he unexpectedly acquitted himself as a father, procuring for the son he barely knew, a wife.

  The first inkling I had of her existence was an envelope sent from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to the Manchester Society of Apothecaries’ Quarterly Journal, forwarded from there to my mother’s former home, and from there back across the Atlantic to my apartment on Horatio Street. The letter inside was addressed to my father. Carol had read one of his articles in the course of her own researches at Harvard, and wondered if the volume-in-progress mentioned in the contributor’s note had ever been completed.

  She wrote by hand, in blue ink on cream-colored card. Her writing was neat and stylish, done with a thick italic nib, so that it looked a little like something from an illuminated manuscript; but lively too – the letters pennanted with so many jibs and serifs they seemed to be fluttering in their own private breeze.

  I wrote back telling her that my father had died before completing the volume, and enclosing copies of his other published articles. She was welcome, I added, to come and look through his papers any time she happened to be in New York.

  A few weeks later she phoned from Cambridge to take me up on my offer.

  She came to my studio on a chilly afternoon in March, wrapped in a long, royal-blue, cape-like coat with a gold-lined hood. I showed her my father’s papers and went out, telling her I would leave her in peace for a few hours. She thanked me, and sat at the desk by the big steel window that looked out over the West River.

  The sun was low in the sky when I came back. Carol was in the same posture as I had left her in earlier, apparently rapt. ‘This is fascinating material,’ she said; ‘your father had an original mind.’

  I didn’t want to admit that I had never actually looked at his papers, and I turned the conversation to her own work instead.

  She was writing a doctoral thesis, she told me, on ideas of purity and pollution in medieval and early Renaissance Europe. One avenue of her researches had led her into the subject of poisons and their antidotes, and it was here, delving into the medieval pharmacopoeia of bezoar stones, griffin claws, terra sigillata, oil of scorpions, powdered smaragdus and so on, that she had chanced on my father’s articles.

  What interested her were certain paradoxes at the heart of medieval thought, such as the equally held belief in the curative powers of both extremely pure and extremely impure substances, and an apparent ambivalence when it came to deciding which of the two categories any given substance belonged to.

  I stood by her as we talked – there was no furniture other than the futon, the desk, and the chair she was sitting in. I’d deliberately kept the place bare since moving in. I liked that ringing emptiness – the sense of promise not yet unfulfilled – you get from a new room you haven’t yet colonised with your things. Against that bareness, Carol’s presence was all the more vivid: a brand-new, gleaming-eyed human phenomenon to take account of. She wore no jewelry or makeup, I noticed. Her straight, almost black hair fell thick and smooth around her face, shiny as a helmet. Her mouth was small but full, with curving shadows at the corners of her lips that gave her expression of cool asperity a barely accountable mirthfulness. She didn’t flirt but she didn’t withhold herself either. When I looked at her she held my gaze candidly, even challengingly, as though curious to test my interest, or my nerve. Her unadorned wrists and hands were finely articulated – long-fingered, with concise, pliant joints that had their own look of high intelligence.

  The sun slid down behind the Hoboken smokestacks. At that hour the river looks taut and self-contained, as if a scooped handful wouldn’t run, but wobble on your palm like mercury, burning coldly.

  I was single then, and at a stage where I was no longer satisfied by the brief relationships and casual flings that my love life so far had consisted of. I had come to realise that I no longer wanted a ‘lover’, or a ‘girlfriend’; that I wanted a wife. I wanted something durable about me – a fortress and a sanctuary. I wanted a woman whom I could love – as a character in a book I’d read put it – sincerely, without irony, and without resignation. I had been observing a self-imposed celibacy as I waited for the right woman to come along: partly so as not to be entangled when I met her, but also, more positively, in order to create in myself the state of receptiveness and high sensitisation I considered necessary for an auspicious first meeting. I believed that human relations were capable of partaking in a certain mystery; that under the right conditions something larger than the sum of what each individual brought with them, could transfuse itself into the encounter, elevating it and permanently shielding it from the grinding destructiveness of everyday life. And just such a mystery, such a baptism-in-love, was what I felt to be heavily and sweetly impending as I stood beside Carol in my room that afternoon. I knew almost nothing of her, and yet it seems to me I knew as much about her at that moment as I ever came to learn in the years that followed. The outward circumstances of her existence were immaterial to the intensity of what passed between us as we paused in our conversa
tion there, high above the river. She could have been brought up in Timbuctoo rather than Palo Alto, could have had five brothers in show business rather than two sisters in medical school; she might have summered with an uncle in the Rockies rather than an aunt in Cape Cod, had a fear of spiders instead of a fear of flying … These details, though charmed because they concerned her, added little to the essential, radiant mutual disclosure that occurred in that moment.

  In silence we watched a barge glide seaward on the gold and mauve water, tumbling curled shavings of foam from its stern.

  ‘That’s some view you have,’ Carol remarked, turning to me with a smile.

  As she looked at me, the firm, clear outline of her beautiful face was lit by the trapezoid of dark yellow light coming in through the window.

  I had the sense of being inscribed on, etched into, by the sight.

  The battered suitcase containing my father’s papers was now back in the hall closet. Even though I had gone to the trouble of bringing it out here to the States, I had always felt an odd, almost narcotic weariness at the thought of going through its contents. But whatever obscure private taboo that weariness represented, it was overruled now by a sense of urgent practical necessity.

  What first caught my eye when I opened the suitcase had nothing to do with my father: bristling all over the piles of manuscript were brightly colored little arrow-shaped clips that Carol had used to mark passages she wanted to return to.

  She always studded whatever she was reading with these things: they were part of her permanent retinue of physical objects, like her tortoiseshell comb or her italic-nibbed silver pen. They were the first things of hers I had seen in months; the first physical evidence that she had once shared my life in this apartment, and the sight of them had a powerful effect on me. She had left something of herself behind after all! Red, green, yellow, blue … they teemed under my eyes like shiny winged insects. I felt simultaneously the sharp anguish of her loss, and the passionate warmth that even a passing thought of her had always been capable of arousing in me. It would have been easy to spend the rest of the evening sitting there adrift on these bits of plastic, thinking about her, and I had to make a deliberate effort to turn my attention instead to the immense piles of yellowed manuscript into which they had been inserted.

  Letting Carol’s markers guide me through the pages, I read with a kind of detached attentiveness, noting the quirks of my father’s mind, the strengths and weaknesses of his thought processes, the turns of phrase he favored, with guarded pleasure and even an occasional moment of wry self-recognition. He was evidently nervous of advancing an argument without first marshaling an army of authorities to support him, then further reinforcing it with an array of obscure technical terms and foreign phrases – insecurities I had noticed in my own work. And like me, he had a preference for lateral, associative movement over the forward march of sequential narrative, which was no doubt one reason why he had never completed his work. Fragments of chapters ramified into multiple digressions that subdivided into footnotes that, like the cells of regenerative limbs, miraculously grew into chapters in their own right.

  At one point Carol’s markers became much more densely clustered. My own interest sharpened in sympathy. Here was a passage on the prevalence of poisoning in the courts of the Borgias and the Burgundians. A lengthy disquisition followed, on the widely held belief in the efficacy of animal horns as antidotes and prophylactics. Stag horns, rams’ horns, hart-shorn; hollowed as goblets, shaved, powdered, dissolved in water or wine, worn as amulets; horns of the antelope, the rhinoceros, the Plate River pyrassouppi, were listed and discussed, their lore and applications summarised, all in a frenzy of deferential nods to Lucretius, Odell Shepard, the Pharmacopoeia Medico-Chymica, while the little sharp arrows of Carol’s attention rained down on almost every line.

  Of all the horns, I read, the alicorn was universally deemed the most powerful. Alicorn? Ah, the horn of the unicorn.

  I knew that Carol had gone back to the manuscript a couple of years after first reading it, when she began her book on the medieval cult of the Virgin Mary. She had wanted to check what my father had had to say about the myth of the unicorn hunt, where the creature is lured into captivity by a virgin, before being killed.

  ‘The creature never lived,’ wrote my father in an extended footnote, ‘yet there is an abundance of evidence for it, and for several centuries the leading minds of their day believed in its existence. Cuvier and Livingstone were among those still prepared to countenance the possibility of an animal with a single horn in its forehead, as late as the nineteenth century. True Unicorn Horn (verum cornu monocerotis) not only had the power to cleanse sullied waters, but was also said to sweat in the presence of poison. For this reason it was worth ten times its weight in gold …’

  I had the sense now that I was getting somewhere, as far as tracking down the source of my anonymous note. I was aware, too, without quite knowing why, that far from reassuring me, this was making me feel distinctly uncomfortable.

  ‘Two explanations exist’, the footnote continued: ‘for the medicinal action of the horn. Polar opposites, they go to the heart not only of the principal paradox in early theories of healing, but also of the ambivalent nature of the unicorn itself. Teeth, hooves, and especially horns, were believed to concentrate the essences of the creatures they came from. In the case of the single horn of a unicorn, this concentrate would of course be twice as strong as in, say, the twinned antlers of a stag.

  Depending on whether an authority believed the essence of a unicorn to be benign or evil, its effect would be explained either by the doctrine of allopathy, where a virtuous substance is thought to counteract a venomous one, or else by the doctrine of homeopathy, which declares that ‘Like Cures Like’ (Similia similibus curantur), and that the only way to detect or disarm a poison is to place it in the diminishing context of something even more poisonous than itself.

  Allegorists wishing to see the unicorn as a symbol of Christ, naturally adhered to the allopathic doctrine, which held that the horn was the ultimate pure substance. The Christianised Greek Bestiary, for example, gives an explicitly religious version of the Cleansing of the Waters, or ‘Water Conning’, illustrated in the second of the Unicorn Tapestries at the Cloisters Museum in New York, asserting that the creature makes the sign of the cross over the water with his horn before dipping it in.

  Homeopathists, on the other hand, regard the horn as the ultimate toxic substance, believing that it sweats in the presence of other poisons because of a desire to mingle with its own kind. The pharmacist Laurent Catelan, noting that horned animals like to eat poisonous substances of all kinds, deduced that a powerful toxic residue of these substances must be stored in their horns.

  Far from Christlike, the unicorn of this school is an aggressive, highly unsociable monster. In pictures of Noah’s Ark or Adam naming the Beasts, it usually has the distinction of being the only creature without a mate. Aelian is alone among the more reputable authorities in mentioning the existence of female unicorns. ‘The males fight not just among themselves,’ he declares, ‘but they war against the females too, pushing the struggle to the death.’ Maddened by the enormous pain caused by the toxins distilled in his horn, the unicorn – ‘this ryght cruell beast’ as John of Trevisa calls him – ‘fyghtyth ofte with the Elyphaunt and woundyth & styketh him in the wombe.’ Atrocissimum est Monoceros begins Julius Solinus’s description, put into English by Arthur Golding: ‘But the cruellest is the Unicorn, a monster that belloweth horriblie …’

  Monoceros: a unicorn. I looked again at the note I had found in my mailbox: Atrocissimum est Monoceros.

  I had half-expected this, but having tracked the phrase to its source, it seemed after all that it solved nothing, or if it did, in doing so merely opened more perplexing questions. How could the phrase have transmigrated from my father’s papers to my mailbox at work? Until now, Carol was the only living person who had read the manuscript, but it was inconceivabl
e that Carol would stoop to anything so puerile as the delivering of cryptic, anonymous notes. Equally inconceivable was the idea that she and this man Trumilcik could somehow be in contact, let alone in cahoots. Carol in her universe of museums, academic conferences, cultured conversation; Trumilcik, whom one could only imagine now as some kind of shambling maniac, a street-ghoul lost in a private labyrinth of paranoia and scatographic rage … It wasn’t possible! I seemed to be up against something impenetrably mysterious. My father … Carol … Trumilcik … Broken sequences seemed to radiate out from me in all directions. Elaine … Barbara Hellermann … Chains with missing links … My mind was whirling!

  I poured myself a drink, and tried to calm down. There were papers to grade, new publications to catch up on. I made an attempt to settle down to an hour or two of work before dinner, but I was too restless to concentrate. I drifted into the kitchen, took the cold leftovers of a Chinese takeout from the fridge, and turned on the radio. A commentator was talking about the possible impeachment of the President. For obvious reasons this was a subject that interested me greatly, and I tried to pay attention. But before I could even tell which side of the question the commentator was on, a name came into my head, appearing there with such a burst of illumination that I said it aloud: