The Invisible Writing

by Les Weil

  While Maria was talking, first on the balcony overlooking the woods, and then on the terrace facing the sea, I had a strong feeling of listening to the langage du destin, as Malraux calls it. That demented uncle seemed to have stepped straight out of the book on Perversions that I had just finished. At moments, an absent look of Maria's reminded me of Attila watching a match burn down between his fingers. There was also that third parallel: the fatal breaking-off of a treatment, which Attila had also done--escaping from the operating table with only a hand pressed against the open gash. I had a feeling of being under a spell, experienced by the spiritual viscerae, as it were. Serial coincidences of this kind had often pursued me when I was passing through a crisis; gradually I have come to regard them as a warning in the symbolic code of the `language of destiny'-see the closing pages of Arrow in the Blue.

  At some point during that evening, I said to Maria, attempting to joke, that in the matter of being `sore and kicked about' she certainly took precedence over me. She repeated, unsmiling, what she had said before, that the worst kick was still in store for me, and that it would be coming soon.

  After that evening, the `uncle' was never again mentioned between us. But the next day, or the day after that, another incident occurred. While we were sitting at lunch, there was a sudden loud crash. A large, heavily-framed picture which, an instant before, had been peacefully hanging on the wall that I was facing, had crashed down onto the sideboard that stood beneath it. It made me jump, whereas Maria, who sat with her back to the picture, did not move a muscle. On the sideboard had stood a row of tumblers filled with milk in various stages of curdling into yoghourt. Maria had a hobby of making her own yoghourt; every morning two glasses of fresh milk were added to the left end of the row, and two glasses of finished yoghourt were taken off the right end. Now most of the glasses were broken; the row looked like a line of soldiers in whose middle a grenade had exploded, and half-curdled milk was splashed all over the sideboard and the floor.

  `How on earth did that happen? I asked, walking over to the battlefield. Maria shrugged, and said nothing. I looked at the back of the picture: the wire was not broken, and the two picture-hooks were still in the wall, solid and undamaged. In fact, I was able to hang the picture back in its former place, where it came again to rest as firmly and innocently as if it had always stayed there. Maria rang the bell, and Mary the maid came shuffling in to clear up the mess. `What happened? she asked. Maria said quietly:

  `Es spuckt.'

  'Schon wieder?' said Mary. `Now Ma'am will have to go without yoghourt for a whole week.'

  When we had settled down again, Maria said gently, as if talking to a child: `Was the wire broken?

  'No,' I said, `but please don't ask me to believe in miracles.'

  `There is no reason to get irritated,' said Maria, `but I told you something of the kind would happen.'

  `What does it mean? I asked, even more irritated.

  `It is a sign,' she said, again shrugging.

  `A sign of what??

  'I don't know. Please let us drop the subject.'

  Maria rarely used the rhetorical `please'. When she did, it had a strangely helpless, pathetic ring--it carried an echo of a frightened child saying `please' to a maniac with whom she had been left alone in a room.

  There were no more spooky events during my stay. Occasionally Maria talked to me about the doctrines of Mahayana Buddhism, the Four Noble Truths concerning pain, and the Eightfold Path. She also gave me a German translation of the Pah Scriptures to read. As a prim little materialist, I was fascinated and repelled, as if I had been dragged inside a metaphysical brothel furnished with lotus flowers, pot-bellied sages, transparent ascetics and little white elephants.

  Discussing the Twelve Causes, I would tell her with exasperation: `But it's all tautological, for God's sake.' Then Maria would say: `Isn't all science also tautological?' I would say: `Perhaps; but the juggling with concrete mathematical symbols does get you somewhere.' `Where?' she would ask languidly.

  Once or twice, on Maria's quiet but insistent demand, we tried table­lifting without success. `You are hopelessly unpsychic,' she said, half resentful, half relieved, with a little laugh. She laughed rarely, and it had a charming sound. The previous sultry tension between us now changed into occasional angry quarrels; they were like cloudbursts that are followed by a smell of moss and mushrooms in the air. Quarrelling openly, like fishwives, was a new and delightful experience for Maria who, brought up in a patrician family, was terribly well-bred and well-behaved. Reconciliation usually took the form of a casual proposal to go for a swim.

  We had got into the habit of having long races in the water--brcast-stroke, back-stroke, side-stroke, and so on. Neither of us had mastered the crawl, nor a proper style, so that after a race to our usual target, a little island half a mile away, we were completely exhausted. Lying on her back, breathless and panting after a victory, Maria had moments of the mysterious, sudden transfiguration of a noble ugly face into one of pure beauty--quickly withdrawing again, as if frightened by its own possibilities, into the safety of its self-made unattractiveness. After such moments, her face shrank and, closed, as shutters are closed against a dazzling glare, and her upper lip lifted like a rabbit's, baring the metal brace on her long, yellow teeth.

  Maria was fighting what seemed to be a winning battle against the powers of insanity. I did not realise it at the time, and I was unaware of the part that I was playing in it. I thus missed a possible opportunity of saving her. For a brilliant and hyper-sensitive young man I was remarkably stupid where others were concerned.

  My hostess was so grimly well-bred and brave, that to give any indication of the situation which had developed was completely unthinkable for her. The situation was that Maria had come to depend on me as a protection against the uncle, the poltergeists and other dangers. Whether she foresaw what would happen when I left, I do not know for certain. The chances are that she did, as will be seen. Yet, when I announced my intention to leave, and the date on which I would be leaving, she did not permit herself a word or gesture beyond the conventional expression of regret that I could not prolong my stay. She walked into insanity with the poise of a woman stepping into the lift at Harrods.

  How this situation had developed is rather difficult to explain. Physical attraction in the traditional sense played no part in it, though in a devious sense it did. We shared a passion for the water. Swimming side by side in the chill of the early morning, we were separated and united by a few inches of the transparent liquid, without the direct physical contact which Maria feared and I did not desire. The panting races had their meaning, too, like the hectic shadows moving across the cave of Plato's parable: the real figures outside the cave were perhaps a Maria ten years younger, and myself ten years older, and both sane. And then, lying side by side in the grass a yard apart, there were those flashes of a transfigured face, almost terrifying in its unrealised beauty-glimpses of the real person swiftly moving past the entrance of the cave.

  It often happens to me in writing these pages that I am unable to visualise my past self. Then I take a photograph from a drawer and say--well, here he is. But even that isn't quite reassuring for I know that that face, with the plastered-down hair and the fatuous smirk is phoney, the product of growing a false personality, whose genesis I have described earlier on.

  From the first time we met, Maria instantly saw through the smirk and the brilliantine; she saw whatever honest substance there was behind it--and behind that honest substance, the ultimate, gaping emptiness: the void of the nineteenth century's scientific materialism, the world as a clockwork mechanism which, once it had somehow been wound up, would forever follow its course predestined by Newton's laws. But at least in this mechanical universe there were no gaps for poltergeists and uncles appearing in triplicate, announced by a wailing mongrel. It was a trite, aseptic universe, but infinitely preferable to one inhabited by demons. If the world was a tale told by an idiot, at least it was not
a tragedy devised by a raving lunatic. Atoms, electrons and protons were nice, clean, harmless little things. If God did not enter the picture, neither did the devils, incubi, succubi, and the remaining zoo of demonology. This was another reason why my presence in the house was a reassurance and a protection. Of course, not every member of the Communist Party or the Rationalist League would have served the same purpose. But I was a budding writer, and so full of self-contradictions that I could enter Maria's point of view, and combat it from the inside, as it were. Also I liked swimming and grappa, and in a way I could be quite nice. Except for abiding with a human being in a desperate predicament.

  But then, I was fighting a rearguard battle of my own, defending my reassuring formulae and equations and ratiocinations against the invisible writing that had appeared on my horizon, and was closing in on me as the uncle was closing in on Maria. And here Maria was on the side of the invader. She was sick, but she had the gift of occasionally reading fragments of the writing. She knew, if only a few words, of a language to which I had been deaf. I was beginning to discern the sounds, though the meaning was incomprehensible to me. Maria was, without knowing it, gradually converting me to her point of view; and I, without knowing it, was converting her to wine. That kind of situation is, of course, quite common; in a marriage it often happens that the partners change their parts. We were playing a mixed game of blind-man's-buff and musical chairs. It was not a highbrow pastime though, but a game for real stakes, for a year later Maria was dead and I was sitting in a condemned cell. So if I use adjectives like `desperate', they are here in their proper place.

  The difference between us was that I deserted Maria, and that Maria would never have deserted me or anybody else. But that too was implicit in the situation, for she could read the commands of the invisible writing, and I was only just beginning to realise that such a thing existed.

  I did not 'suffer' during this mental crisis as one suffers from a toothache. But I was in a kind of chronic inner turmoil, which, though it concerned seemingly abstract matters, made me cry out in my sleep, and the nature of which I can best illustrate by a digression.

  In 1952, I met in Princeton an old friend, the late Hans Reichenbach, a leading mathematical logician and Professor of Philosophy at the University of California. I had not seen him for nearly twenty years. He had aged and become partly deaf; instead of a modern hearing aid, he used an old-fashioned ear-trumpet. He asked me what I had been interested in lately, and I told him that I had become interested in Rhine's work on extra-sensory perception. He said that it was all hokum, and I said that I did not think so--at least the statistical evaluation of the experiments seemed to show relevant results (meaning that they seemed to confirm the existence of telepathy and kindred phenomena). Reichenbach smiled and asked: `Who has checked the statistics?' I said: `R. A. Fisher in person.' (Fisher is one of the leading contemporary experts in probability calculus.) Reichenbach adjusted his trumpet. `Who did you say? I yelled into the trumpet: `Fisher. The Fisher.' At that moment an extraordinary change took place in Reichenbach's face. He went pale, dropped his trumpet and said: `If that is true, it is terrible, terrible. it would mean that I would have to scrap everything and start from the beginning.' In other words, if extra-sensory perception exists, the whole edifice of materialist philosophy crumbles. And for a professional philosopher that means the crumbling of his life's work.

  The rearguard battle that I fought against Maria was of a similarly abstract, and yet deeply emotional nature. I was younger than Reichenbach and not a professor; yet to accept the existence of another plane of reality, inaccessible to the rational mind, nevertheless meant a minor spiritual death­and-rebirth. My already shaky Communist creed was merely the brittle edge of my beliefs. But behind it stood everything that I had thought and believed from my early schooldays, based on the proud achievements of three un­equalled centuries, from the Renaissance to the triumphant nineteenth. Behind it stood the conquest of obscurantism and superstition, the great disinfection of the human mind, the belief in reason and progress, the draining of the marshy lands of mysticism, the feeling of hard solid rock under one's feet. Now everything seemed to give way, as at the slow beginning of a landslide. Maria thought that my soreness was the result of being kicked around; but it was rather the result of inner kickings, a kind of cramp or convulsion of the spiritual viscerae, which can be very frightening.

  This condition led to some absurd scenes in the house on the lake. One day, we were again facing each other across the luncheon table in the blaze of noon on the terrace. We had been out swimming, and I could still feel the ripples of water around me, and the circles of silence over the lake. I remarked to Maria that if I did not watch out I would spend all day in the lake, and the novel would never be finished. It was the wrong thing to say. Maria never drew me away from my work and hardly ever set foot on the upper floor. On that day, quite exceptionally, she had knocked on my door and had timidly suggested that I go swimming with her. It must have been hard for her to do that; she must have felt unusually lonely or afraid. In my obtuseness, I had not been aware of this.

  She said coolly: `If you wanted to go on working, you only had to say no.'

  At last I realised that Maria was hurt. I tried to turn the matter into a joke and said that I had never been able to say no to temptation. But Maria, with one of her infuriating transitions from mermaid to schoolmarm, remarked that temptations could be resisted by means of the Free Will. Soon we were launched again on one of our unending, embittered discussions on Determinism versus Free Will.

  On this occasion the argument became particularly acrimonious. Determinism was already a lost position in my crumbling world. Modern physics had several years before abandoned the concept of a strictly determined universe regulated by causal laws. But to abandon Determinism in the sense in which classical science had understood it did not necessarily mean that one had to accept the postulate of Free Will. There were several ways out, such as replacing the laws of causality by laws of probability, and interpreting the latter in a smugly rationalistic manner For, to accept the concept of Free Will meant to accept ultimate responsibility for all one's actions, past and present, conscious or otherwise. It meant to accept an unbearable load of guilt and shame--without the comforts of an ethically neutral science, which allowed one to regard oneself as a chemical machine, without freedom and responsibility, blindly obeying the stresses and pushes of the internal and external environment. I was not ready to accept the burden of freedom.

  Accordingly, I became more and more irritated, and began shouting Maria down. Maria reciprocated by throwing her deadly little darts. The more I shouted, the more coolly polite her manner became. Then, suddenly, I had a beastly inspiration. We were eating cold fruit-soup. The soup was served in a huge tureen. It was a beautiful piece of china, and Maria was particularly fond of it. She hated things being broken, even a Woolworth tumbler. The veranda was surrounded by large, polished panels of glass. I got up, by now trembling with anger, and lifted the tureen up from the table. 1 said:

  `Look, Maria, let us settle this problem in an empirical way, once and for all. If you continue to assert that I have a Free Will, you will thereby enrage me to a point when I cannot help smashing this tureen against the window­pane, for my actions are determined by your words. If you recognise that there is no such thing as a Free Will, the tureen will automatically be safe. But what is a tureen compared to the problem we are trying to settle?'

  `It is my tureen,' Maria said, watching my hands with anguish.

  `I give you ten seconds to decide.' I started counting-one-two-three, in a cold rage. The rage was increased by my realisation that to Maria the tureen mattered more than the problem that was tormenting me. I felt that Maria was a sham, and hated her all the more for it. A well-bred, rich woman, living in comfort, getting a kick out of silly hallucinations, chit­chatting about Communism and Free Will to pass the time. What did she know about lousy hotel-rooms, and living in a hayloft, and
having to ask her for half a franc for toothpaste? I was counting on aloud, determined to smash the tureen at the sound of ten, relishing in advance the shattering crash against the huge window-pane, in a frenzy of resentment, vulgar envy, meanness and cruelty. Years of frustration seemed to well up, and disgorge them­selves like a mud-volcano. At the count of nine, Maria said:

  `All right, you win, put it down.'