Human Pages

by John Elliott

  ‘So secretly, they began to plot against him. Their plan was simple: capture Odysseus and set him adrift. In the presence of their most potent fetish, they propitiated the gods for the success of their enterprise and found favour with Aeolus and Hebe. The auguries being fair, they set the appointed time and drew lots for the leading roles, but Linnaeus, who could not bear to betray his old companion in arms, stole to Odysseus’ side and whispered in his ear two words, “Treachery, exile.”

  ‘Odysseus wept. His body shrank and aged. Then he embraced Linnaeus tenderly and said, “Fear not. I will go to them. I’ll submit to them, but first they will hear me out.”

  ‘He duly mustered the company and, laying his sword and shield on the deck, proclaimed, “Whatever my fate is, I accept it. Wherever my lot leads, I follow it. You all know the man who inhabits this aging carcase. You all loved him once. You profited by his invention. You saw the light of another day by his cunning and martial skill. This man you see before you will surely die, but the name Odysseus will not. For I have it on the authority of Pallas Athene that my name will be translated into every tongue. Wherever she holds sway, the goatherd in his hut, the wine trader in the market, the prince surrounded by his warriors, all will know the name Odysseus. Therefore, I propose to you, as my final counsel, that you keep and nourish this god-given treasure, my name. One of you will become meta-Odysseus. Yes, he will lie with his queen, Penelope. He will hunt with his son, Telemachus, and bring his kingdom wisdom. The men who set out all those years ago are not the same as those who will return to Ithaca. Each one of you knows me and what I have done. Each of you carries the memory of past and home. Whomever you choose to be meta-Odysseus, I will tell him my inmost secrets. He will know all that is known to me. He will recall what I recall. What you choose to do with me is your concern, for I vow that henceforth I will never return to what was once my own.”

  ‘Hurriedly confiscating his weapons, they agreed his strategy and, within the hour, nominated Thalessos, who belonged to Ithaca’s weakest sept, for they were confident they could manipulate him, even though he held the trappings of power.

  ‘Odysseus, true to his word, imparted the necessary details of his life to the soon to be meta-Odysseus. When all had been revealed, including the dirty little secrets, and Thalessos moved freely and comfortably through the rooms and fields of his captain’s childhood and youth, recognising friend and foe, ardent with the knowledge of the marriage bed and wary of thwarted rivals, they granted Odysseus the consolation of a raft stocked with a week’s frugal provisions. Solemnly, and for some tearfully, they watched him disappear to larboard in the run of the wine-dark sea.

  ‘Now, at last, the wind veered round. The sail bellied full, and to their ringing cheers the prow sped homewards like a leaping porpoise. Within the month they sighted the Ithacan roads. Joyfully, they waited for the tide and toasted their good fortune. In their exultation, they forgot the arbitrary wrath and cruelty of the gods, who had nurtured one Odysseus and one alone. It was Zeus, himself, who unleashed the thunderbolt out of a yellow dawn, which, heralding their doom, sundered their frail ship from bow to stern. Only one man survived the cataclysm. Clinging half-dead to the wreckage, gigantic waves hurled him to the shore.

  ‘Next day, barely recovered, Thalessos rose unsteadily to his feet. Dragging himself off the cove where he had been swept, he came to a fork in the track. One way he knew led to the palace and kingship, the other to family and home. He fell to his knees and wept. Then, in a fateful moment, his mind was made up. No man can escape his own mortality, he reasoned. His path ahead was clear. He chose to wear the crown.

  ‘They brought the stranger before the queen at her command. Her suitors hemmed him in with imprecations and pushing hands. “Who are you?” asked Penelope.

  ‘“I am Odysseus,” he replied.

  ‘“You are not the Odysseus known to me,” she said sadly, looking him up and down.

  ‘“I am indeed your Odysseus and to prove it I will tell you of the talisman you gave me when we last embraced.”

  ‘His description of the brooch and the pin was so vivid that Penelope, to her surprise, saw it again in the instant it had left her hand for that of her long-lost husband’s. “Where is it now,” she murmured, “and where are your companions and ship?”

  ‘“Alas, they are lost! You’ll find their bodies and the mast broken on the rocks, but you will not find Odysseus because I am standing here before you.” He then uttered the words he had said to her on their parting, followed by the words she had said to him.

  ‘Astounded, Penelope felt ready to acclaim the returned wanderer, but her native caution stilled her heart, and she questioned him again. “If you were Odysseus would you not remember your favourite dog, Argos?”

  ‘“Aye,” he said, “I knew him from a pup. He had white sides, a russet back and a tail with a black tip.”

  ‘“Then send out the groom and bring him in,” cried Penelope joyfully, “for I have fed him the broth of life, whose secret was bestowed to me by Pallas Athene. He still lives after all these decades of war and separation. Apart from me, he will go to no one but Odysseus.”’

  Jacob Kemmer paused and pointed to his depiction of the bloody consequence of the deceit, which culminated in the slaughter of meta-Odysseus. In total contrast, a small panel to the left of the carnage portrayed an Arcadian scene of harmony and richness. A venerable man clad in animal skins, his hair bedecked with the flowers of the wood and field, presided over a happy band of followers.

  ‘As you can see,’ Jacob continued, dropping his pseudo-Homeric style, ‘Odysseus reached our shore. Humbled by his travails and in a new-found spirit of generosity, he shared his knowledge of the world, his patient arts and strategies, with the people he met along the banks of this very river. Under his tutelage, our city was born. He is its patron and to this day we still partake of his vices and virtues.’

  Sonny had stared for a long time at the scene beneath their feet, losing and regaining Kemmer’s narrative as he tried to reconcile the naïvely drawn rag-bag of figures, seascapes and landscapes with the elements of the story he already knew and the parts that were unfamiliar. Like the painting The Fall of Icarus, the stated theme, the foundation of Greenlea, occurred peripherally, almost unnoticed in the background.

  ‘Have we met somewhere before?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Why do you ask?’ Jacob stubbed out his second cigarette.

  ‘No reason. My work brings me into contact with people you might describe as meta-Odysseuses.’

  Jacob waited for him to expand, but Sonny did not say anything as he leant over and dropped a handful of coins into the collection pail.

  ‘Let me give you this. It might interest you.’ Jacob fished out a card. ‘Several of my works have been photographed. They’re in this exhibition. It’s on tonight if you’ve got the time to spare.’

  Sonny glanced at it out of politeness. He had all the time, if not in the world, at least from the moment last evening when he had put down the phone after Monse’s call and had listened to the clock’s unhurried tick. The imperative choice is to look and hear, he thought, rather than to ignore and pass by.

  HIDDEN GREENLEA/ TRANSITORY IMAGES

  Melo

  4 Lavell Place

  Sponsored by Amadeo Cresci Foundation

  ‘Is there something amusing?’

  ‘Only the beauty of chance coincidence. Seek and ye shall find as the scriptures say. Do you know anything about the sponsors? They interest me.’

  Jacob shook his head. ‘The public’s my only patron. A photographer came up one day and asked if she could take me working. She returned last week and told me I was in the exhibition. I went to see it yesterday. That’s all I know.’

  Sonny said goodbye and resumed walking. The card nestled against the sheets of Elizabeth Kerry’s message in his pocket. Pieces of whatever it was were coming together at random. He got the feeling they were going to continue to accrete one by one no mat
ter where he went: now on his walk to the ferry terminal, later on his trip to Panalquin, this evening on his visit to hidden Greenlea.

  Gusts of wind pummelled his chest and pinned back his trouser legs as he rounded the final bend of the embankment. The low concrete building of the ferry terminal lay ahead. Images of meta-Odysseus crawling crab-like on the beach came to him as he squinted into the blast, his eyes filling with moisture. Which ghost really haunts me? he wondered. Was it his real father who he had dragged from his untimely grave and transported back, time and time again, to Llomera and Paca Ceret’s wine shop, or was it a meta-Manolo, his own creation, a figment of his wish for revenge, who, like his father, was really someone else, someone unknown, someone unreachable? ‘He never thought of Ithaca. He frowned and snapped his fingers dismissively when anyone mentioned it and the ties of home.’ Jacob Kemmer’s words replayed in his ear, but where had he heard the words he so facilely put in the mouths of Paca, Vincenz, Tony Pigeon and My Son, his witnesses to his wanderer’s return? Who had told him the gist of the tales they would tell, the thoughts they would express? Tian Marva, of course, their contemporary, the weaver of the sirens’ song, his mother’s lover and his future stepfather.

  Inside the echoing booking hall, he joined a short queue to buy a return ticket to Panalquin. The departure board showed that the next ferry was running fifteen minutes late. Pushing the exit door open, his face battered by the even more robust and insistent blasts of wind, he watched as the incoming boat, dwarfed by the bulk of a rusting tanker behind it in the roads, beat its way towards the end of the mole and the shelter of the quay. No ancient gods were likely to impede its progress. Satisfied that he would soon be on board, he turned away from the water’s edge and went back to the terminal. At the entrance, on the other side of the glass, he glimpsed a woman’s face staring out. She looked sad. Her eyes were fixed on some point beyond him, her features immobile, as if forever set in repose. Monica Randell, he thought, always fated to journey home. While at the same time in his mind’s eye he saw Victor Larries pull open his desk drawer and take a long swig from the bottle he had secreted there for such a day of rain and dull, grey winter sameness, when incipient despair insinuated itself into each impulse, gesture and fantasy, dampening and muting them down to the point of extinction. Sylvia’s eyes, he told himself, rather remember Sylvia’s eyes. Youth was on their side. They recognised the reality of hurt but were not daunted by it. Her stories merely helped her pass her working time. Today she would have a new one, the previous ones forgotten.

  Inside, he entered the warm fug of the bar where the server’s enquiring look dispelled his reverie. He ordered a shot of Demerara rum to go with his coffee. Around him, the narrow room reverberated with the noise of strangers breaking into unaccustomed conversations over the lateness of the ferry, the volume steadily heightening as each vied to make themselves heard above the others. An elbow jabbed his arm as he took a swallow. Carefully, he poured the rest of the rum into his cup and threaded his way to the seating area at the back. One chair alone was vacant at a small table for two. A man sat opposite, his face shielded by the open spread of the Sportsman’s Gazette.

  ‘Is it taken?’

  The man lowered his paper. ‘No.’

  It was too late to withdraw. Sonny recognised one of his recent clients, a ‘sticky’ in the jargon, indicating a serial buyer of Chance Company packages, whom he had met on his arrival at the Tara Village apartment. ‘Hello again. This is truly by chance. I’m catching the ferry.’

  ‘And I’m meeting someone off it.’ Antoine Viall folded his paper and put it down on the table. ‘You look preoccupied, Mr Ayza. The cares of business no doubt. One might think you’d really have preferred not bumping into me.’

  Sonny forced a smile. The affected vapidity of Viall’s tone of voice, the mock pursing of his lips after each enunciated syllable, coupled with the languorous tilt of his head, irritated him. Narcissus looking at me as though I were his mirror, he thought. A replica ‘Man About Town’ rehearsing his bon mots.

  ‘Antoine Viall,’ Antoine continued. ‘I meant to ask you. Did he ever exist?’

  ‘Like all our products, as I’m sure you know, Antoine Viall is the intellectual copyright of the company. You’ve leased the file with the adjuncts you specified. When the lease ends another client can be offered the contract.’

  ‘And if I held onto it, if I persisted in being Antoine Viall, what would the company do?’

  ‘Take legal action. A tiresome matter for you. I guess at the very least it would bore you to tears.’

  Viall laughed. ‘Touché. I’m tempted, you see. This is the best excursion I’ve taken. Mr Sembele has quite become my mentor. Only last night, he said to me, “The keys of the kingdom, Antoine. I can give you the keys of the kingdom.” Well, that gave me succour. I swear he looks on me as a surrogate son. It makes you think. “They’re jangling, baby,” he said. “Don’t you hear them? They’re jangling just for you.”’ He laughed again then paused and looked round as the strains of an accordion started up in the doorway.

  An elderly woman with untidy ginger hair, dressed in a grubby fawn raincoat, grimaced at the ceiling while her fingers stabbed its buttons and her arm extended its bellows. In spite of an ill-executed rendition, Sonny made out the strains of ‘Naomi’s Waltz’, a tune which was currently popular with the buskers who went back and forwards on the ferries. ‘You’ve only a week left,’ he said. ‘I’d say it was time for you to come back to reality and plan for the future.’

  Viall turned back round to him and flexing his right hand gloomily studied his fingernails. ‘My trouble is.’ He fell silent as the music stopped and another tune started. ‘My trouble is I want to go on being Antoine Viall, but I’m afraid I’m beginning to be caught up in violence. Perhaps even be implicated in a crime. Walter has employed this man, Emmet Briggs, a thug, an old-time hoodlum in the protection rackets here, ridiculous in his way, but I think capable of,’ he paused then spelt it out softly for effect, ‘m - u - r - d - e - r. My suspicion is Walter and he are planning to kill someone and it’s going to happen very soon. Briggs bought a gun last night. I was there. I saw it handed over.’

  Damn it, Sonny thought. Was this real or simply another part of the client’s fantasy, a route to increased self-dramatisation? It was difficult to decide. ‘For your own safety, you should get out immediately,’ he advised. ‘Tell the police what you know. I’ll alert the company to handle things our end.’

  Viall shook his head. ‘You don’t understand. It excites me, Mr Ayza. It excites me so much. It’s the most thrilling thing that has happened to me since I witnessed a shooting in the Bronx. I was on a different contract then with your New York set up. Right outside Blatteriblax Records. I was standing there and suddenly blaam, pop pop. Do you know Emmet Briggs?’

  ‘No.’

  The accordion player pushed against their table, handing a mauve card to Sonny before he could question Viall further. It read, ‘I am a deaf and dumb mute from birth. Help me sustain myself. Thanks for your generous giving.’ She widened the opening of her canvas bag. Sonny passed her card to Viall and fumbled in his pocket for change. To his surprise, Viall turned the card over, took out a pen and began to write on it. The woman, emitting a high-pitched hum of alarm, tried desperately to wrest it from him. After a brief tussle, Antoine relinquished it and watched nonchalantly as, with a shaking hand, she smoothed at its surface in a vain attempt to efface whatever it was he had written. She pulled away from them in anger, still uttering panted signals of distress. All eyes in the bar had swivelled in their direction. A murmur of disapproval swelled. Antoine got to his feet. Sonny caught his sleeve and motioned to him to sit down again, which he reluctantly did. The hooter sounded outside. The awaited ferry had finally docked.

  ‘I’m staying with it. You won’t change my mind. Forget what I said. I didn’t really intend to tell anyone. After all, we met purely by accident. It’s just my feeling and I could easily be mist
aken. Now I’ve someone to meet.’

  ‘Tell me about Blatteriblax. We can walk together.’

  Without replying, Viall rose from the table and pushed his way through the press of people making for the door. Sonny tried to follow him, but in the crush it was impossible to get past the intervening bodies. He watched Viall’s head bob and disappear.

  The last file of passengers were descending the gangway when he finally managed to get outside. A young blonde woman reached the quay and waved to Viall who was standing by a bollard at the stern. She joined him and took his arm. They spoke and began to walk away. Sonny eased through the crowd and hurried in their direction. The woman looked inquiringly at Viall as, breaking into a trot, he caught them up. ‘Don’t worry, Corinne,’ Viall said, before Sonny could speak, ‘Mr Ayza and I have finished our business.’ He raised his right index finger to his lips. They walked off together. If Sonny wanted to go to Panalquin he had to go now. He turned back. Blatteriblax for the moment remained a name on a piece of paper.

  *

  Tired of walking by herself in the damp chill of Greenlea’s suburbs, Agnes retraced her steps round the perimeter of the castle, which disappointingly had turned out to be an ersatz gothic pile of stained yellow and rose bricks erected in the mid-nineteenth century by a local sugar magnate.

  Two dogs scampered towards her up the path. She hunched her shoulders and pushed her hands deeper into her parka pockets. The larger one, male she noted by its stiffening prick, worried persistently at the other’s neck and flank. A man with their coiled choke leads about his arm came into view. He spoke to her as she passed, but his words were merely sound, unintelligible to her ears.

  This lack of light, she thought as she reached the park exit and crossed the road. Everywhere there is this oppressive grey. More days of this and I surely will have the blues. She wanted to feel the velvet soft skin of a ripe peach in the cup of her hand, to have the trickle of juice squeezed from its flesh fill her mouth, to bask in the warm current of air when she stepped on to her back porch, shielding her eyes from the glare of the sun glinting off the car roofs in the road below. Instead, she was enveloped in grey murk. Everything around was muted and dull, from the flow of the traffic to the lacklustre displays in shop windows and the averted faces of passers-by. The search for René Darshel, she hardly thought of him as her father anymore, was leading her away from all that she knew, all that she liked. He was turning her into a stranger to herself, forcing her along streets she did not want to go along, isolating her in a city she need never have known, whose only attraction was the possibility that he might be somewhere in its midst.