The Dead Seagull

by George Barker

  * * * *

  Who has seen tomorrow; It is Medusa. Then I foresaw all the things that, worming and writhing on the face of the future, compelled me, by the laws of self-destruction, to accomplish them. That night a great storm, to be remembered in those parts for years, took hold of the coast and shook it like a blanket. The sea, just before the storm broke, lay coiled in glassy masses that heaved in disunion against each other. It looked as though it had multiplied its weight with darkness. Panicky gusts of wind hurried about the hills, searching, as it might be, for some shelter. And in the woodwork of the cottage a groaning arose from unaccustomed stresses. The sky showered livid gashes of brightness as though it had split. Electricity, like a cat, hissed and spat in the first fall of rain. And then the structure of the sky collapsed, and the storm fell down upon us.

  Theresa came and sat closely beside me. I found that I could not bring myself to look, even out of the corner of my eye, towards the window and the sea: for it seemed to me that the great waves were parading themselves like lunatics across it, grinning in the glass. The uproar became a pandemonium of hissing and wailing and howling. Every object in the south joined in the orgy.

  I held Theresa to me, for the thunder unnerved her. At each explosion she shivered; and the lightning, flickering about the room like a poltergeist, made her bow her head and close her eyes with a gasp.

  Then, with a clatter of glass, the body of a bird, driven through the window, span, shedding feathers, at our feet. Theresa cried out. The wind charged through the broken window. Feathers swept about in tiny frenzies. The dead bird, its breast torn and bleeding, clutched with its wings and claws at Theresa’s feet.

  She sat, transfixed, staring down at the death at her feet.

  “Look at the window,” she said. “Marsden is there.”

  The seaward door flew open as the lock turned. The bird came to a moment of galvanic life as the new drive of wind lifted it. Standing in the open door, the great sea waves tossing behind her, and the wind making wings of her hair, Marsden walked down out of the storm.

  Perhaps because she had expected this exact advent, Theresa continued to stare at the corpse of the bird. She made no effort to rid her feet of it, as though it were fastened to her with an inseparable tie. I understood for a nightmarish instant that it was the corpse of the bird that I was married to, and Theresa, immobile in the chair, its appendage.

  Marsden herself seemed aware of the unreality of her sudden appearance out of the storm. She looked distraught and exhausted. The door banged behind her. Her eyes were red and excited. She had not spoken. And then, drawn by a sort of unnatural compulsion, Marsden and I turned our eyes upon Theresa.

  She had gathered the dislocated bird up in her arms and risen from the chair. Like a sleepwalker she turned towards the door that gave on to the bedroom. And in a soft voice that came to us beneath the hullabaloo of the winds rather than above it, she said: “I think that my child is going to be born.”

  At that instant a whole catastrophe of thunder shook the cottage. I sprang to Theresa and carried her, with Marsden doing what she could to help, into the bedroom. She rested there, breathing, now, quietly, with her eyes closed. Coldly Marsden said: “Go and get a doctor.” Theresa opened her eyes. “It is no use,” she whispered. “He is too far away and the time is too near.”

  “Look after her,” I called backward to Marsden, and, fighting with the wind, made my way down the road. Here there was a public telephone. The wires, providentially, had not yet been torn down. I begged the doctor, who lived some eighteen miles away, to come to Theresa. He told me in a tart voice that I had summoned him out of bed. I entreated him. He said that he would try. “You may not know it,” he remarked, “but there is a hurricane on over here.”

  The storm beat furiously in the telephone booth. “Blast your soul,” I cried, “come over!” And I rushed back to the cottage.

  * * * *

  Oh how the sea mourned and groaned against the wall! I thought of the whales giving birth, in a bath of blood, thousands of fathoms down in the darkness and thousands of miles away. Do they know what function they are fulfilling with their pangs? Will their gigantic paroxysms redeem themselves in the flow of milk from the mother to its young? Was she wasted, the big cow who could not deliver it, and whose corpse rolled away, bruising itself on rocks at the bottom of the sea; I mourn this moment for her wherever she lies rotting.

  The storm, for an hour, subsided. Marsden, with a grey and tired face, sat by the side of Theresa’s bed. She looked like a person who has wrestled with their own angel and been defeated. We sat waiting for an immortality to step into the room. Then, from the other side of the bedroom, to which she had retreated, Marsden lifted her hand and pointed to the bed. “Look,” she whispered in horror.

  The red lips were drawn back across the teeth, the face clawed, for a moment, at life; the eyes seemed to vault in their sockets, and Theresa screamed, “Oh, I have split in two!”

  * * * *

  When the doctor eventually arrived, the child had been delivered. I said the child had been delivered; but I am wrong. It was not a child, it was a corpse.

  * * * *

  The doctor left as the cocks began to crow and the sun came up behind the cottage. “She will rest,” he said, “but she’s very weak and I must call again this afternoon. I will tell you”—he took me by the arm—“that I don’t very much like the look of things. She has an unusually weak heart. Be careful.” He took his leave with a sort of encouraging half smile.

  Marsden stood in the door of the bedroom watching me show the doctor out. When I turned to her I saw that her face was disfigured with several streaks of blood, drawn across it, seemingly, by her tired hand. She leaned against the frame of the door and whispered to me. I suspected, for a moment, that she was in tears. I took her face in my hands and saw that instead of tears her eyes were alive and livid with sexual desire. She pressed her breasts against me and darted her open mouth over mine. I smelt the puerperal and the aphrodisiacal. “Come,” she murmured, “you’re tired. It’s time for bed.”

  * * * *

  But I could not sleep. Leaving her coiled in smiles and sighs on the couch, I went down to the seashore. I found that I was carrying the body of the dead bird in my hand. I flung it far out into the flat shallows. The rippled splash, caught by the early sun, opened in a wound of roses and lips. The dead bird disappeared. I turned and went heavily back into the house. They were both sleeping.

  * * * *

  Surely I do not need to offer explanations? The paraphernalia of circumstances, like penitentiaries in which the poor and the aged wait to die, concern us only insofar as people suffer within them. It is the grief and the splendour, not the time and the place, that go on. But the credentials, the elucidations, the addresses at which destiny has called on any given day—these particulars remain the concern of the police and the recording angel. I am concerning myself with the cause of the crime.

  Thus it is when we consider the promises unfulfilled, the necessary declarations never spoken, the projects unattempted, the revelations obscured, the cities still unspoliated, the valuable monsters still at liberty—when we consider the multiplicity of our omissions, then all the crimes in the calendar and on the index become instantly possible for any one of us.

  The death of my son who never breathed, spoke, it seemed to me, in the vocabulary of response; I knew that in answer to a solicitation of my being so passionate and so profound that I could never have uttered it in language, he had bowed his head and concurred and walked away. And what I had done with a desire of the body I had undone with a spiritual rejection, with a denial as the cock crew. The voice of the cock was the voice of Saint Thomas Aquinas intoning out of a cloud: “But it is best never to have been born.” At this the congregation of my body—the imagination in its sanctum, the heart in its big bed, the rational faculty in its tall tower of ivory and glass, the passions in their trick-lock cages—they lowered their heads and sighe
d in absolute acquiescence. “Lucky dog, lucky dog,” they murmured. And, seeking for the tears of her relief, I turned my gaze to the dying mother on her bed, since she was now going home. I looked to see her face illuminated by the approach of the sacred negation. I followed her wandering in the wilderness of her expended anguish, praying, as I believed she prayed, for the moment when she became a mirage and the wilderness a discarded illusion.

  But I saw in her face, instead, the heavens at night, silent, full of the birth of new stars, glittering with incipient miracles, dark with possibilities, an infinitesimal world of millions blazing at the end of an eyelash, all human happiness and misery rocked in the hammock of a cheek, all the glory of love in the sunset of her lips as she moistened them over each other. And I leaned my head downward into this universe of a single life and heard the silence in between the expressible antinomies speak in the voice of Francisco de Ossuma: “The greater Love is, the less it has need of words. Because Love, if it is true, is unable to seek the exercise of subtle reasonings, but works great things in silence.”

  * * * *

  The evening looped its cloths about the bedroom and the glass of milk on a small table looked like a huge pearl. In the distance the hollow echo arose of a workman plying a hammer on wood; but this ceased in a short time and there was no sound in the cottage. Marsden stood gazing into space out of the window. I looked long at that face that has smiled at me from the frames of famous pictures in every great gallery, that face of the mistress of all the great masters. I saw again, and more deeply, a face in which fruits and cherubs sought to conceal the orgies of egoism taking place in a cave behind them; a face in which the suicide or the devotee, casting himself in the hope of drowning, would find, instead, dynamos that slowly cut him into pieces. I saw in this face rocks with mannequins combing their hair. The face of an Ischia where the wave is smiling; the beauties, combing their hair, utter the inveiglings of her conversations, and out of view, not heard, feared but not suspected, the sty of victims, fatuously happy and irrecoverably degraded, slewing about in the juice of infatuation. The face of the mother of mysteries that should remain forever unrealised.

  As I looked at her, the silence of the bedroom, with the dying figure on the bed, the big breasted beauty at the window, the first personal singular half way between them, I sensed that the nature of the silence suddenly changed: then it was charged, in a moment, with what was about to happen. This anticipation struck me quite still, as nature is fixed and rooted the moment before the eruption or the earthquake. Marsden, at the window, seemed to turn to stone. The silence overwhelmed everything with its consciousness of the climax that was to follow: and in this silence, where only Theresa’s heavy breathing existed, I heard, distantly, a voice, quite different from Marsden’s, speak no more than a couple of words.

  But because I knew that this was an hallucination I made no sign that I had heard anyone speak. Then Marsden, trembling, turned to me from the window, her eyes glittering and splendid with self-examination, an expression upon her face of daemonic elation and uncomprehending inevitability, and in a louder voice repeated the sentence that opened her womb and revealed the child curled inside it.

  “Yes,” she said sharply, closing her eyes, “yes. It is true.”

  The face of the figure on the bed, white and smiling, seemed to me then to violate the laws of physics and detach itself from the body whose sufferings it at once showed and concealed from the world. And I thought that it hung suspended in the air in front of me, like a bird about to enter its tree. The lips, discoloured, parted to speak, but I heard no sound. It looked at me with trust and gentleness and truth. Then, wailing and moaning, it fell spinning down away from me, and the word that it moaned was the verb of love.

  I knelt by the bedside and took Theresa’s hand where it lay upon the cover. Marsden, at the window, stared down in pride and deference at life and death. Theresa turned her head slowly away from me towards the window. Exaggerated by shadows, Marsden stood like a monument in the room. Her shadow lay across the bed. In a high, clear, seemingly inspired voice, as though it were called up from the depths that only her last agonies of mind could reach, Theresa cried out, twice, before she died: “I curse you! I curse you!”

  THREE

  I WRITE THESE LAST PAGES TO YOU, MY DEAR Sebastian, without in any way hoping that even my most importunate solicitations will disturb your sleep, or, if you do not sleep, reach you wherever you happily are. No, it is not in the belief that communication between us is even conceivable that I write your name here; it is simpler, and sadder, and more wretched than the illusory supernaturalism of an impossible correspondence: it is, my dear son, the sensation I have of your standing here, a tall child with a recognisable face and a somehow familiar manner, your standing here at the side of this white table, as I write your name a yard away from your presence. And if you were indeed here, a grown boy of—let me say—thirteen or fourteen years, old enough, then, to ask the truly hard questions, the simple ones that drag up the roots of truth with them, if you were here, on this afternoon of rain and memory and remorse, what would you say to me? I can bear the bitterness of your accusations, if you should choose to accuse me. And if you should ask for reasonable explanations, I could give these, too—even though these reasonable explanations would be reasonable explanations of unreasonable happenings.

  Will you ask me why you died? Is this question the perpetual uneasiness that vexes your cherubim of a spectre? No, this, I am sure, is not the great interrogation that you carry about like a crux anxata in front of you. For now, hopping about in eternals, playing with the mercy and justice of God as you might have played with my watch and my fountain pen, you will know that the answer to the question, Why, is always the same. For, now, you yourself are part of the answer to this question. I can believe, myself, that the dispensations of the heavenly Will bend their heads and listen, if they bend them at all, to the supplications of the dead rather than to those of the living. Even that, to some degree, the will of God is—no, not modified, not mollified, but, made, perhaps, a little more human, by the accumulated admonitions of all those who have died. So that we, the living, are, in this sense, indebted to our predecessors for some small mercies.

  Then I say that, simply because you died, you will know better than I do why you died. And, my dear son, as you stand, in my mind, no more than an embrace away from me in this room, I would wish to read a sentence to you from the confessions of a cardinal I spent this morning perusing: “And so I argue,” he writes, “about the world; if there be a God, since there is a God, the human race is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity. It is out of joint with the purposes of its Creator. This is a fact, a fact as true as the fact of its existence, and thus the doctrine of what is theologically called original sin becomes to me almost as certain as that the world exists, and as the existence of God.” You will ask me for what reason I repeat that desperate cry of John Henry Newman’s. I do so because I have discovered the nature and name of the mystery he terms “some terrible aboriginal calamity”, the calamity in which we necessarily labour. My dear son, it is love. Yes, Love is the terrible aboriginal calamity.

  * * * *

  Outside my window a handful of women, hung around a magnificent renaissance fountain, belabour their washing with sticks, and gossip, and play with their dirty children. Often I cannot tell whether it is their voices or the sudden flutter of pigeons that I hear below. The rain, as I wrote, ceased, and the Italian sun stepped out of a cloud; after sharp showers, said Peace, most sheer is the sun, and love is never warmer than after war in this world. For then the bodies of those who have died, lying about among stars and rocks, sidle together, like the lovers on the hillside at the Messina earthquake, and kiss the cold from each other’s mouths. So, my dear son, I kiss you. For I think that I, too, have died.

  Not far from my window a lake lies deep among mountains, and, in the evenings, I often walk along its single stretch of shore. It is a birthplace
of mirages. Out of the flickering waters and the sometimes flashing mountains, with, lately, the stars, out of the reflections and shadows, the apparatus, as it were, for my apparitions, the gilded images of my memory have emerged and followed me along the foreshore.

  You, my sweet Sebastian, shot full of wounds, a little boy trailing a martyrdom behind him, holding your mother by her hand, and she with her face wiped away by the handkerchief of grief, you both have walked with me by the lake. And now I am no longer surprised—indeed, if you do not do so, I am actually disappointed—when you accompany me. When one evening in the late summer, you, both of you, for what must have been the second or third time, took me, at either side, by the hand, and the three of us walked in silence, each in no way puzzled at the presence of the others, that evening, I remember, returning alone along the shore, I was faintly surprised—I was even, I think, a little bit amused—to find only one parallel of shoeprints going where we had gone. And I soon grew accustomed to that at first exacerbating sensation of knowing either you or your mother was following me, at all sorts of unpropitious times, just at the rear of my vision’s sideways extension.

  But not all these illusions were gilded with this idyllic melancholy. I was awakened on the morning of Sunday the twenty-seventh of August by a voice crying my name out loudly from beneath the window. This voice, high and sweet like the note of a flute, pierced a dream in which, for the hundredth time, you and I, my small son, sailed in boats or rode upon ponies or quietly strolled together; and in the dream, suddenly and fiercely, at a moment when you were, by mischance, out of my sight, I trembled to hear your voice calling my name, as though you had lost me. I awoke with sweat in my hands. It was still almost dark. A cold wind blew in through the open window. The quiet of the hour before morning sat like a dew upon all things in the room. My heart galloped about my breast and tossed its horns wildly. And then, again, clear, not twenty yards from me, your voice brightly cried out the name of its father. It called me again and again. Not with impatience, not with resentment, not with accusation, but in a clear, sweet insistence, as though you knew that I would come, without failure, in a few moments.