by Frame, Janet
—I can’t bear to look at Tolstoy, one had said.
—I can’t look at any of them, the other replied. —Here, have you read this: Campus Death?
—Campus Death? I don’t think so. Isn’t he the author of Death of a Don?
—I think he is. A far cry from The Death of Ivan Ilych.
The other looked serious. —That kind of life’s over for me, he said, with a wistfulness, as if he were talking of sex.
—I quite enjoy these detective stories. There’s an art in them, you know. (He was defensive.)
—I find they’re good to relax with.
What neither of them said was that when you plan to retire, to get to the country of perpetual relaxation, and you start travelling there and eventually arrive you may find you have picked up a perpetual sense of despair and a feeling of timelessness that is not merely the abandoning of timetables and not the grand eternity ‘pinnacled dim in the intense inane’, but a prospect of desert, of fruitlessness from which death begins to appear, enticingly, as the last springtime.
—You’ll feel better reading these, George Lee prescribed as he spilled the books from their plastic bag on to the sofa beside me. I caught a glimpse of lurid covers, bloodied wounds and daggers, corpses, cloaks, heavy furniture, bureaux, bare-shouldered women laughing, dead.
—They look ghastly, but you’ll relax with these.
—Aren’t you betraying all those ‘other’ books in your library? I wrote.
Liz was cheerful. I could tell by her smile and her quick gestures.
—Not at all. A detective novel is good for you.
For most of their visit we sat in the usual silence. The palm trees outside were waving furiously in what appeared to be a very strong wind indeed. The air was hot, stinging with the feel of sand even in the room.
—The wind is blowing from the Sahara, Liz wrote. —Is this your first sirocco?
My natural shyness came over me. I was aware of the vulnerability that accompanies ‘first’ experiences. I thought of the created world within its first week of creation and the raging sensitivity of every material manifestation – the first time of light, of dark, night, day of dust leaves, creatures – a trembling enough time; but for man, who has memory, perhaps a time for which, in the experience of the explosion of his senses, he still pays, for which the darkening rather than the illumination of memory is acclaimed as a blessed state.
The creation of the world. A great distance from my first sirocco. I had to rely, now, entirely on my sight and my imagination, my sense of touch, smell and space, for my appreciation of the sirocco.
In my mind I half-heard a theatrical wind and I saw, suddenly, a book from which I had learned to read, with a page called ‘The Wind’ and the picture of the people in the streets, the hats held, skirts billowing, sunshades turned inside out, trees and flowers bowed to earth, a man chasing his bowler hat along the street, dogs running. I saw in my mind, then, a ‘literary’ wind. A literal wind, literarily portrayed.
In actuality, here, from the window of the small house, I watched with George and Liz Lee the sirocco swirl upon the town. The agitation of the palms was terrible to see. The sky became filled with clouds billowing with an orange tint like the smoke of a distant fire: it was a colour that seen in the sky has the power to fill the heart with foreboding; it was an ‘earthquake colour’, the colour of an ancient battlefield in the time of huge cannons operated by men diminished in comparison, and it was also the colour of a hydrogen bomb, an atom operated by men so tall in comparison that their shadow could take a twilight walk from horizon to horizon across the earth.
—Three years ago, George wrote on a new sheet of paper, —houses near the promenade were flattened.
I did not write an answer but I looked impressed. I was also amused, as I thought suddenly that my deafness was not such a calamity if it could eliminate from conversation the curious custom of the you-are-about-to-be-amazed question followed by the now-this-will-amaze-you answer.
—No.
A ‘no’ that lies between these two amazements is one of the hardest words to pronounce.
—You don’t know what happened?
—No.
—Houses near the promenade were flattened!
I did feel relieved that through my deafness I was escaping the heavy conversationalists who make one work for the privilege of speaking to them, whose every remark demands a visible explosive response.
Also, I was escaping George’s ‘Angela will be livid. Old, retired.’
—Can you go out in the sirocco? I wrote.
—Oh yes, this isn’t so bad. We must be leaving you.
As Liz wrote she spoke the words, or moved her lips in an exaggerated manner.
—You will have to learn to lip-read. And you mustn’t give up speaking.
I think I said, —No, I shan’t give up speaking.
As I spoke I put my hand on my throat, taking my voice by the hand, as it were, to encourage it. I felt its vibrations but of course I heard nothing.
—There’s the deaf and dumb language, the finger language, too, George wrote.
Then both looked at me. Their faces were full of sympathy.
—It’s worse away from your native land, George wrote.
I had the feeling he was referring to himself and not to me.
My next visitors, again after an interval of a few days, were Connie and Max Watercress.
—We’ve heard, Connie wrote when I gave her the sheet of paper and a pen.
Reading what she had written, she blushed beneath her layer of makeup for she had a sensitivity which operated apart from herself and which she did not recognise: she and it were strangers living in the same house; a curious position to be in; the effect was that of startling her every now and again with her own feelings and intuitions.
She crossed out what she had written, adding, —We’re terribly sorry. What an extraordinary thing to have happened. Is it really permanent?
I wrote, —Yes. Permanent.
She frowned and said something to Max who looked at me closely, that is to say, he inspected me with his large swimmingly brown eyes behind their magnified lenses.
—What about the Fellowship? he wrote.
—What about it?
—We can’t have it harmed in any way.
—What do you mean, ‘harmed’?
Both Connie and Max looked uncomfortable upon reading my question.
—Are you sure you wouldn’t rather that someone else came to take up the Fellowship?
Hesitating a moment, Connie wrote, —Someone younger?
—But I’m thirty-three!
—Of course, of course. But it’s perhaps a bad age.
—What do you mean, a bad age?
—Well, in between. We could ask someone younger to step in…to help you of course, for you can’t stay in Menton, can you?
—Why not?
—Not deaf, surely?
—Why not?
—We’re only thinking of your own welfare.
Max underlined this last sentence.
Connie took the pen from Max and wrote, —You’ll miss so much of the life, so many experiences through being deaf. You won’t be using the Fellowship to good advantage.
I was obstinate.
—I’ll be using it as much as I can. And it’s my Fellowship. It may be the Watercress-Armstrong Fellowship in honour of Rose Hurndell bless her thorns and blossoms and haemorrhaged brain but it’s been awarded to me and I don’t see how my being deaf or dumb or blind can affect it.
—Don’t be angry, Harry. Of course, the Committee awarded you the Fellowship but we have to think of the Fellowship, you know.
—You mean if I had been deaf when I applied I might not have been awarded it?
—We have to have people who can cope.
—I can cope.
—You can cope less now than you could with your hearing. You might have a traffic accident. You won’t be able to speak to people. You can
’t spend all your time in correspondence.
—Why not? Have you anyone in mind to take over the Fellowship?
Max and Connie looked at each other and did not try to write their answer. I wrote it for them.
—What about Michael? He’s getting a reputation as a writer. He’s written some good stories.
Immediately they became parents rather than guardians of a Fellowship. Forgetting for the moment that I was deaf, Connie looked at Max and said (I knew by heart what she would say and my study of her lips showed me my surmise was correct), —He’s such a clever boy.
I found myself mimicking her within myself.
—Such a clever boy.
—He has perfect pitch.
—Perfect pitch.
—He could be anything.
Clever boy, perfect pitch, beard, he could be anything.
I wrote on my paper, —What about his beard?
Connie looked puzzled.
—What do you mean?
—He is perfect for the part.
She looked relieved.
—Do you think so?
—Yes.
—You suggest then that you give up the Fellowship, we fly you home to New Zealand for expert medical treatment, and we give the Fellowship to Michael – after a committee meeting of course, with a decision made unanimously by the Committee?
I hope that I looked coldly at her and I cursed ballpoint pens or any kind of pen that cannot also convey cold looks.
I wrote, —I suggest no such thing. I was awarded the Fellowship and I’m keeping it, deaf or dumb or blind or mad or whatever.
—Even if you can’t cope?
—Who said I can’t cope?
—You’re deaf. Some harm may come to the Fellowship.
As I read her words I realised that she and Max looked on the Fellowship as a live creature which they had hatched together and which they felt they had to protect. Their possessive instinct was fierce. I sensed that there might be for them times when even Rose Hurndell, dead, for whom the Fellowship was a memorial, could be a danger, perhaps as much a danger as the living writers who did not play the game of, as it were, fitting the garment that had been cut and sewn for them, particularly when they learned how closely it resembled a shroud!
—But we’ve never had a deaf Fellow.
—You have one now.
—The Committee will have to look into it.
I was angry.
—Let the Committee look into it. I’m staying.
Suddenly their attitude changed. They became sympathetic.
—Of course you can stay. You are the Fellow. We were just thinking of your own welfare and what you will do now that you’re deaf.
They made the same remark as the Lees.
—You can’t give up speaking just because you’re deaf. You might become deaf-and-dumb.
Their writing deaf-and-dumb in hyphens frightened me; I don’t recall being frightened before by hyphens. These told me that I now had an inevitable label, that I was parcelled, tied in string with ‘deaf’ and ‘dumb’ as the two ends of the bow – bows can be undone – no, it was more than that – I had been made my own complement, sealed by the hyphens to words whose function is to seal – deaf-and-dumb, over-and-under, up-and-down, back-and-forth, black-and-white, cash-and-carry, pen-and-ink, words which, because they range in two hemispheres of meaning, have a deceptive sense of space and freedom until one is trapped within them by the boundary-making mouths of beings who talk, meaning no harm.
He’s deaf-and-dumb.
I was.
I was even afraid now to put my hand to my throat to feel the vibrations of my voice – at least I hesitated to do this, in company. I could not quite believe that I had been silenced perhaps for life by the fact that one word not being entirely at home on its own, tended to ally itself to another. Deaf-and-dumb. Not deaf-and-happy, deaf-and-peaceful, deaf-and-industrious.
I was not dumb.
—I’m not dumb, I said, or hoped that I said.
Connie and Max looked startled. Obviously I had spoken too loud.
—He’s shouting, Connie said.
I read her lips.
—He doesn’t know he’s shouting, Max answered.
The feeling of loneliness came over me once more as I watched the lips moving with the recognisable words, the words utterly isolated from sound expression – I had not realised until then that we own the words we speak as we own the food we swallow or reject; we own the words, command them, shift them, re-emphasise them; they, powerful, have little power over our speaking them; the loneliness that came over me was caused, I think, by the degradation of the words, their descent from the pampered sheltered ones to the homeless outcasts that could not be spared an inflexion or a morsel of emphasis or a loving hesitation.
I’ll shout if I like, I thought.
—So you see I’m not dumb.
Connie took the paper and wrote, —We know you’re not dumb. Your voice is too loud. Did you know? We must go now. We hope your deafness doesn’t interfere with your writing.
Max took the paper then, and wrote, —We hope you’ll think seriously about your condition. Medicine is always dearer in another country.
I wrote in reply, —Everything is always comparative in another country. Crooks are crookeder, grass is greener, heights are higher, words are wordier, pleasures are more pleasurable, death is deader, life is livelier, dogs are doggier, fortune is more fortunate, vaults more vaulted, distance is further, water more watery, blue is bluer, grey is greyer, fame more famous, continuance more continuing, consumers more consumed, reality more real, fantasy more fantastic, adjustments more adjusted, fires more fiery, chaos more chaotic…I mean to say…
(Both Connie and Max were beginning to look impatient at my cataloguing.)
—I also mean to say, the deaf are deafer and the dumb are dumber. Is that not so?
—You mustn’t be bitter, Connie wrote. Remember you’re the Watercress-Armstrong Fellow.
I smiled as I shook hands with them, in the French way, as I saw them out the front door.
Remember you’re the Watercress-Armstrong Fellow.
How will I forget it? I thought, wishing I would let myself speak, shouting or no shouting but I did not want the hyacinths, just breaking into bud by the door, to curdle and curl their blue petals all for the sake of a human voice that from now on had to go out of my mouth alone, without any guidance, and which in its confusion might give the impression of rage or hate, any emotion, all in a frightening incongruity enough to scare the words back into my mouth.
I did not want to see a scarred or burned track like a no man’s land wherever my spoken words passed by; I did not want to destroy the ordinary vegetation of ordinary conversation, the desultory communication that accomplishes its dull purpose of communicating without undue melodrama or tragedy or even comedy.
I did not want my words to be, unknown to me, missiles, sticks and stones.
I knew that I had not felt, before, this tenderness towards words. Somehow I had always thought they could look after themselves, they could be used and even abused and they would always recover or sleep it off within the pages of the dictionary where most of them spent most of their time anyway. I suppose it will affect my writing, I thought. My being deaf. Deaf-and-dumb. And all these words with no sound to them and even their inner sound doomed to a gradual diminishing. The musical notes, at least, can look after themselves, they’re nonentities, slabs of vanilla, spaghetti, it is they who are the sticks and stones, they have no reliance on the human mouth and the human ear; we eavesdrop on words; music eavesdrops on our ears.
Eavesdrop.
What a dew filled word it sounded, sounded in my still inviolate inner ear. Eavesdrop.
In a world of lost eaves. Eaves had scarcely been my word at all. My word was ‘gutter’, ‘spouting’. The word ‘eaves’ was at peace in a literary world.
I eavesdropped.
I overheard. I underheard.
I think that as Connie and Max Watercress went out the gate they called out to me, —Michael and Grace are coming to see you in a couple of days.
I did not hear them. Nor did I read their lips. I knew what they said, my knowing a combination of intuition, common sense and a grasp of the momentary intersection of circumstance and people and an imagination of the signposts which the people carried or remarked in their minds. I was to learn to use this intuition with increasing skill that often led others to suppose that I was not always deaf or completely deaf, that I could ‘switch on or off’ at will. This idea of the deaf hearing only what they want to hear is a neat explanation which survives as clichés and commonplaces do, by its neatness and apparent unassailability. It is wishful thinking, the longing to reclaim the power of mind over body particularly when an overwhelming illness or disability has washed in like an eroding tide over the shores of the body. In my deafness I could not hear what I thought that I wanted to hear. I could hear nothing.
Constantly I was aware also that by being deaf and not blind I was being deprived of some romantic fulfilment of a finer tragedy. The comparison between deafness and blindness occupied those who knew me. There would be long debates on whether it was ‘better’ to be deaf or blind, always with the assumption that one affliction was necessary. The first remark of many people meeting me for the first time and knowing of my deafness was:
—It’s better than being blind, anyway.
—I suppose you’re glad you’re not blind.
Then would follow, if two or more people had come to ‘cheer me up’ or for whatever other reason, the discussion about which they’d rather be. It was a game they played, like the child’s game of choosing between two offered treats, both equally enticing – a golden ring or a silver casket, a castle or a farm with two hundred head of cattle; or even marriage partners – a princess or a scullery maid. At times their discussion became so clinical that it reminded me of a conference of insurance agents meeting to put a price on lost eyes and hearing and other facilities and pleasures and limbs; fortunately I remained unpriced.