The Cemetery in Barnes
Page 8
Perhaps I am, he would say.
Perhaps, she would mock him. Perhaps. It is his favourite word.
What would we do without it?
We would live our lives more happily, she would respond.
More happily perhaps, he would come back at her, but more humanly? More richly?
Who is he to talk to me about the richness of life? she would say. I ask you. The richness of life is living in the present with what you have.
He would put his foot on the arm of the sofa and draw up the leg of his trousers to show them the scar. It’s still there, he would say. After all these years.
And why is it still there? she would ask. It is there because you want it to be there.
What I want doesn’t come into it, he would say. It is there because it will not go away.
And why will it not go away?
Who knows? he would say.
Who knows? Who knows? she would mock. I’ll tell you who knows. I know.
He could not believe that the charred bodies he was shown had once been living people. He could not recognise the other corpse they had dragged from the burning house. On his way out he saw Mabel, but she pretended not to see him and he for his part had nothing to say to her.
A long night, he thought.
It was as he sat under a tree in the Old Barnes Cemetery, as he discovered it was called, that the idea of moving to Paris first came to him. At first he simply toyed with it as one of those fantasies it’s fun to have but which are so far beyond the bounds of possibility that they can safely be indulged. The cost of travel to such worlds is minimal, as is the effort required. There are no plans to make, no suitcases to pack, no precious possessions to dispose of. You sit under a tree, on an overgrown tombstone perhaps, and you are there, or there, or there. But as is the way with the imagination, thinking frequently and long enough about something makes it seem at first possible, then even probable, and, finally, necessary. And that is how he got to Paris, he would say. First by imagining, then by asking himself why not, and finally he was there, rocking himself in the rocker in his little flat high up above the streets of Paris, listening to the strains of Orfeo on the gramophone or sitting on his favourite bench beneath the trees in the cemetery of Montparnasse, his eyes open but unseeing, or walking along the river looking at the city reflected in its placid waters, or up the hill and over the Butte de Montmartre on his way to the flea market at the Porte de Clignancourt.
As he walked he thought of the way she had bent to put the key in the lock, then straightened and entered, closing the door behind her. And he thought too of the way their eyes had locked that day on the towpath and she had looked at him and slowly shaken her head.
As soon as I saw him I knew he needed to get married, his wife – his second wife – would say. He had been alone long enough.
I did not need to get married, he would say. I chose to do so.
You can call it instinct, she would say. But as soon as I saw him I knew it.
Instinct she has in abundance, he would say.
He needed someone to take care of him, she would say.
I was perfectly capable of taking care of myself, he would respond. I had after all done so for many years.
You had done so because you had to, she would say. It was not what you chose.
How do people know what they have chosen and not chosen? he would ask. They may think they have not chosen but perhaps in reality they have.
Listen to him, she would say. He never sticks to the subject but always manages to generalise. It’s another way of avoiding life.
Perhaps, he would say.
I may not be well educated, she would say, but one thing is for sure, I never avoided life.
That’s true, he would say.
Their banter, which in other couples might have been a way of fighting private battles in public, was with them always loving and always half ironic. It was also deeply ritualistic. You felt it was their way of expressing pride in each other.
As she stood in the middle of the room, carefully wiping a record before reverentially handing it to him, he would gaze at her in love and admiration. He lowered the needle and they heard the orchestra strike up. Orpheus sang:
Fu ben felice il giorno,
Mio ben, che pria ti vidi,
E più felice l’ora
Che per te sospirai,
Poich’ al mio sospirar tu sospirasti;
Felicissimo il punto
Che la candida mano,
Pegno di pura fede, a me porgesti.
Happy was the day,
O my treasure, when first I saw you,
And happier still the hour
When first for you I sighed,
For you too at my sighing sighed;
But happiest of all the moment
When you gave me your snow-white hand,
A pledge of faith eternal.
By staging this drama of loss, he said, Monteverdi discovers depths of feeling and expression in both music and the voice that no one before him had known existed. But there is no hiding that it is, nonetheless, a loss.
In Putney he had spent many afternoons in the local fleapit in the Chelverton Road, just off the High Street. I do not know if it still exists today, he would say; even in those days I was at times the only person there, watching some Fellini or Bergman film, totally absorbed. And it gave me a particular pleasure to come out into the sunlight, he would say, and walk slowly through the backstreets down to the river. There I would lean over the railings and gaze down into the water.
Minutes, sometimes hours would go by. When he finally looked up and stepped back the sky was already darkening and he knew it was time to go home. Slowly he would retrace his steps, perhaps stopping on the way to buy something for supper.
In Paris, he thought, he would forge himself a new life, free of the melancholy that seemed to hang over Putney, whatever the weather, the pervasive feeling that nothing had ever happened there and nothing ever would, free of the perpetual greyness which seemed to cling to the place even on bright summer days.
He wondered if other people felt this. His best friend at Oxford had been fond of quoting the remark that ‘the world of the happy man is other than the world of the unhappy man’. Perhaps, he thought, this was the world he carried with him and would go on carrying no matter where he lived. Nevertheless, the idea of Paris continued to haunt him, its streets and cafés, its old houses, its gardens and squares, its cathedral and its river. He liked to stroll along the quais, stopping to browse in the little bookstalls set up against the wall, occasionally picking up a copy of the poems of Nerval or the essays of Georges Bataille. It was there he had come across the Regrets of du Bellay, and the title had immediately struck a chord in him. There was so much to regret, so much that could have been different.
The opening words enchanted him. The volume begins with a dedicatory poem to a Monsieur d’Avanson, who was, according to the notes, ‘Counsellor to the King in his Private Council’. But instead of the expected effusions there is only a series of bleak quatrains, the first of which sets the tone for the whole volume.
Si je n’ay plus la faveur de la Muse,
Et si mes vers se trouvent imparfaits,
Le lieu, le temps, l’aage ou je les ay faits,
Et mes ennuis leur serviront d’excuse.
If I’m no longer in the good books of the Muse,
And if my verses seem ill-formed,
The place, the time, my youth, my genes, my woes –
All these can serve as my excuse.
But there is, of course, no excuse. For it is not really his art but his life that he is talking about, and for one’s life not living up to expectation there is no excuse, except for the paltry one that this is true of everybody’s life.
He would talk of his fantasies of drowning, vivid images he experienced when he was living in Paris, after the death of his first wife. As I sank I would feel quite relieved, he would say. I would think: There go
es another life – and know I had not finished with this one.
One sprouts so many lives, he would say, and look at her and smile. One is a murderer. One an incendiary. One a suicide. One lives in London. One in Paris. One in New York.
One, one, one, she would echo, mocking him.
With his grey hat pulled low over his eyes he climbs the stairs out of the rue Saint Julien.
About the Author
Gabriel Josipovici was born in Nice in 1940 to Russo-Italian, Romano-Levantine parents. He lived in Egypt till 1956, when he came to Britain. He read English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and from 1963 to 1998 taught literature in the School of European Studies at the University of Sussex. He is the author of eighteen novels, three volumes of short stories, nine books of criticism, numerous plays for stage and radio, and a memoir of his mother, the poet and translator Sacha Rabinovitch.
By the Same Author
Also by Gabriel Josipovici
from Carcanet Press
FICTION
Hotel Andromeda
Infinity
Heart’s Wings
After and Making Mistakes
Everything Passes
Goldberg: Variations
Now
Moo Pak
In a Hotel Garden
The Big Glass
Steps: Selected Fiction and Drama
In the Fertile Land
Contre Jour: A Triptych after Pierre Bonnard
NON-FICTION
The Teller and the Tale: Essays on Literature & Culture 1990–2015
The Singer on the Shore: Essays 1991–2004
Text and Voice: Essays 1981–1991
Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 2018
by Carcanet Press Ltd
Alliance House, 30 Cross Street
Manchester M2 7AQ
Text copyright © Gabriel Josipovici, 2018.
The right of Gabriel Josipovici to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library, ISBN 9781784105464.
Book design: Luke Allan. Printed by SRP Ltd.
The publisher acknowledges financial assistance from Arts Council England.