Can the Gods Cry?

by Allan Cameron

  Or I dream.

  This

  To this and all the sadness of this world I write these words of happy oblivion desired and almost gained! I felt and feared that at some future date I would feel no more. No more hear the cries of pain that sear the night and invade my dreams. But then I felt and always feared that I would never cease to feel those pointless wounds that never brought a balm to those who scream and doubtless suffer out of sight.

  This is a struggle to retain – to re-evoke those moments of the past that could slip away like leaves scattered by a gust or simply rotting where they lie, losing all the colours they displayed on the branch or brightened and nuanced during the early stages of their desiccation. Memories take on those bright golds, yellows and reddish browns burnished by their retelling. And then they too rot or let themselves be carried off on the rush of time so they can come flying back into our brains heavy with new meanings. These joys and bitter blows lift or shatter hopes and tell us truths of what this is – this crazy thing that we all know too well and yet cannot define.

  I try to recall what I witnessed standing safely at a hotel window, while the smallest cogs of history turned and ground another people’s hopes to dust, as they always must. I saw that great crowd of sans-culottes, then full of faces but faceless now the image fades – a crowd of Bengalis in their lungis and singlets marching by the million to the racetrack hemmed in on every side by soldiers wielding batons lethargically, beating without passion, without zest, because they had to. And those same soldiers, Bengalis too, would, some months from then, fight and die for a nation they would never see, forgotten in the unforgiving flood of history.

  The image fades but not what I have learnt: there are few wholly good or evil men, only individuals swept along and now and then resisting vainly all the vicious power of that amorphous flood.

  This is to feel with all our senses sharpened by the will to be – to be in the moment and forget for once the weight of years to come or drawn behind, that drag us down or will. This moment sweet – to lie within another’s arms and feel the smoothness of her skin, the involucre of her warm and naked soul. This moment when the wind comes in and bites the cheeks with unrelenting force – the force of nature that cohabits still this manufactured land. This lunch when food plays long and vibrant on our budding nerves and slips forgotten into the abyss of our unending needs. And how we shout and turn upon each other with our cares, our thoughts, our strong beliefs of all the things we cannot know with any certitude. We fret and manipulate our words, wanting to win – but what? And will they understand those words in a century, in a decade’s time or even in ten days from now? Who cares? We have the now. We stand in it and declare our truths.

  And now those vinous moments of the now are in the past and mainly inhabit my memory of Italy, a land where they know how to talk or did. The flasks of wine, the grated cheese that smelt, the oil so new it stings upon the tongue, and all those heady, heady words that melt within the brain and touch those nerves that for far too long have not had anything to feel or grasp.

  This hell, this hole: how many times do we return to the darkness of the past? This earthly hell can surely not be followed by an unearthly one. This feeling trapped within a self, a bag of nerves that jangle not just with our own pain, but also with our compassion for that of others. At least our own pain, if it does not break us, makes us strong and therefore serves a purpose. If ever you foolishly dwell on your pains of the past, then take a look at that pompous prick who pampered all his life now smugly observes from his position of great or petty power his secure kingdom of unappreciated delights and honours granted for his acceptance of all the hierarchical chain into which he so snugly fits. Such people at the slightest slight react with anger or self-pity. They do not know that success merely locks the door to the cell in which the self is caught; it makes a prison of a tight abode.

  A trip up who knows what secluded tributary of the Niger, a small ship that carried me and my white-uniformed father, and a baggage of lies so serpentine I could not name them here, is my small taste of hell – a smaller portion than most must swallow in their early years. He did not want me on the trip and he knew why. The boat was working hard, laying buoys and lifting them, running lines of soundings, sextants and numbers called, and inking-in the maps – that evening craft surveyors combine with draughts of whisky well-diluted in that sticky, sweaty clime. And I under orders to keep away, out of sight, he said, what are you doing here? The silent scream, that’s the clever trick you learn – to stand aside, keep dumb and smile upon a jaundiced world. The engineer took pity on a little lad who dumbly wandered on the decks and read. I passed the weeks in the engine room on a second chair he put out especially for me. An Irishman, he knew how to talk and listen too. He knew how to laugh and watch the dials all the same. The mindless engines toiled away and shuddered as they did. Perhaps this was the most important place, and not the bridge from which I was banned. Eventually we got back to the same deserted Lagos quay, but not my mother’s car. When all had left, my father and I stood on the deck. Powerless, he sweated under the vertical rays of the sun; perhaps he stood aside, kept dumb and smiled upon a jaundiced world. He wore his white uniform shorts and white shirt with epaulettes, contrasting with his dark and hirsute skin. He threw aside his peaked Ports Authority hat, the symbol of his rank, and bared his balding head to the cruel sun. He did not care. The lucky state in which we care no more. He knew. I did not know, but he knew his wife had been lying with another man. Trapped in his solitude, he directed what anger he had at me, who insisted on disturbing the completeness of his isolation. Did he not know the human condition? Did he not understand his adult world? Who knows, for he had learnt well how to stand aside, keep dumb and smile weakly on a jaundiced world. After many hours, a car appeared, an orange Beetle which disgorged a young man running with a letter to consign. My father waylaid him with a smile and lots of chat, and of course a plea for a lift home. I never spoke to the man nor he to me, but I remember him clearly: a redhead with a drawn and freckled face, glasses, bad teeth and an energetic smile. My mother screamed, “I’ll not see the boy.” Knowing so much and not understanding, I was an embarrassment now. So I waited in the hall. I stood aside, kept dumb and smiled upon a jaundiced world. The servants had fled but slowly returned – Adolphus too. He used to bring discovered treasures from the marketplace when I was very small: drums and strange hats, and painted knick-knacks made at home, nicely carved in soft, light woods. He was sacked on a technicality, because he knew too much. He cycled away without a possession in this world and was framed in the oval rear window of our car, to where I cannot say. What did he do when he got there? Did he scream and shout, denounce the perfidious foreigner and beat his fist on the table? Most probably he stood aside, kept dumb and smiled warmly on a jaundiced world.

  This is also made of raptures, those moments of escape when the mind concentrates on one thing and distils its pleasure from some problematic of a kind our passions can delight in. A sport, a broke-down car, a mountain face, a place unknown, a book, a canvas stabbed with paint, these all suppress the self, throw wide the cell door and reveal a limitless plain of infinitudes, of ways and ways of doing, seeing, moving, searching, calling, expressing to others and oneself the wondrous permutations of how we can consume this, this elusive thing we never notice until it is at risk.

  The artist measured up his work with steady eyes and critically calculated all those marks of paint: the colours, contrast, composition, brushwork, pose, poise, expression of the hurt, pathos of the suffering saint – a noose loosely fitted round his scraggy neck. Then he leapt, large brush in hand heavy with black paint. And how he laboured with that destructive arm, which spread a night across the surface of his work. No dawn would resurrect the fearsome portrayal of a martyred end. But still he paints a lonely figure whose afflicted corpse-to-be stands free of ground, of time, of pain perhaps, levitated by the energy of sacrifice. The hooded hangman’s gone; so has the cro
wd that gleeful jostled and stretched forward to enjoy the show; the light of heavens triumphant has been dulled, so loneliness remains.

  This contains those civic moments by which we measure out the passing years: birth, pair-bonding of a kind, birth of children, the repeating cycle of their this, and then death. This, rather grandly, also posits such events within the timeline history dictates: “two years before the war”, “just after the recession”, “when they landed on the moon”. This is how the micro- and the macrocosm should relate; their unequal trajectories are not mechanic things – the individual can rebel and should. This belongs beyond oneself and beyond the triteness of one’s age and its conformist certitudes.

  What is this this?

  It is this little thing that seems so big, this life we share, this tangle of shattered nerves, this string of thoughts that lonely twist and turn, fly up into the airless light where ideas are born and the gods sing, or sink into the deep, depressing water that presses on our lungs and cruel clears away all hope, where drags us down the leaden weight of that elusive thing we call reality. Like all small things, this life is capable of endless variegations, and the stack of stuff of which it’s made can be shuffled in so many ways; in one small yard behind a block of flats, a history of lives can be played out, and more happens in one small child’s brain than in several light-years of space. This is a divine gift we have to please ourselves, to please others and to waste… and, of course, regret.

  And when you get to the end, it is a book already published – no chance to correct or rewrite, and the pages are already turning yellow. It is a story randomly told, and what it lacks in coherence it makes up for in its tragicomic commerce of traducements and prodigal human passions.

  Escaping the Self

  Bill Havelock and his buddy were sauntering along a lane lost in a flat featureless landscape. Without any purpose. In the distance they could see a country church with a round, flintstone tower, and a huddle of medieval and modern buildings. There was a railway that divided the land and the immense fields whose different shades of green and yellow declared what kind of monoculture they had been subjected to and what stage they had arrived at in the cycle of growth and harvest. Where the railway went in either direction was not known, and Bill Havelock and his buddy did not pose the question. Theirs was an aimless walk, a chance to chatter and laugh. Mainly they discussed their shared fixation: body-building. This meant how to improve their performance, how well they were doing and some gossip about other members of the body-building community. They looked like brothers, even identical twins. Knots of muscles filled their jackets and rounded their shoulders. Their angular faces looked as though they had been made in a mould. They were, of course, completely unrelated, but if you put together endless hours of workouts with regular injections of testosterone supplement then you get a very similar, plasticky product.

  They moved effortlessly, aware of their own power and enjoying it. The only problem with their beautifully sculpted bodies was that they had no idea of what to do with them. And then they found a use or rather it was provided as if by divine intervention, because they hadn’t previously noticed the old man bent double and shuffling along with his stick. They laughed, and wondered what game they could play. Not having a great store of imagination, they grinned at each other and decided to do the only thing that seemed plausible in the circumstances. They quickly caught up with the old man, Bill grabbed him by the shoulder and his buddy punched the curved and fragile figure in the stomach. Bill kicked him as he fell to the ground and then the two heaved the now crippled old man into the drainage ditch that ran alongside the lane. They laughed and rubbed their hands together.

  Their laughter died in their taurine necks as they watched the old man metamorphose into a creature a lot like them. He stood up and his torn shirt revealed rippling stomach muscles beautifully tanned and glistening in the summer sun that pummelled the tidy monotony of that almost empty land. With a single bound, he leapt on them and banged their heads together as a fierce mother might treat her children. He then hurled them one after the other into the same ditch from which he had just emerged.

  The two men were mildly concussed and now shared a terrible secret: they had been drubbed by an old man. A few months later at the gym, they saw the same old man shuffling along with his stick towards the gentlemen’s lavatories. Slow to learn but quick to feel revenge’s goad, they rushed towards him, just as he struggled through the lavatory door. He was a lamb or perhaps a broken-backed goat to the slaughter. Merriment tingled in their blood and their blood coursed in their vigorous, cholesterol-free veins. Life has its moments, and they felt like greyhounds after the hare – creatures with a smooth and healthy pelt that pounded towards their weakling prey. They bounced into the men’s loos panting with desire, only to find a man a lot like them. Bill’s buddy was now armed with a flick-knife which he produced with a single movement of his arm and hand. The snap of the opening mechanism underscored the silence of that room. He bravely flung himself at the adversary, who with another single movement grabbed the buddy’s wrist, twisted him around, removed the weapon and threw its owner headfirst against the mirror above the basins. Now Bill attacked, and again was turned around. Next he felt the knife’s blade sinking into his lower back. He fell to the ground.

  The two wounded men were rushed to hospital and the police always remained convinced that they had fought each other. They both received six-month prison sentences and never saw each other again. Whatever may be said about our prison system which locks up the mentally ill for venial crimes and has them rot in an environment more corrupting than rehabilitating, Bill left prison a reformed man. He ceased to spend his life in the pursuit of a beautiful muscly body, always supposing that a muscly body is beautiful. He turned instead to helping others and paying back his debt to society. He could be seen wheeling old ladies in wheelchairs, loading containers with charitable gifts for Moldavia and taking part in sponsored runs. He married, had children and looked after his mother. He worked in a bank and was a model employee. Promotion followed promotion, and everyone said that Bill was an upstanding citizen. And the years went by.

  Fifteen years went by and there was a knock at his office door. He was leaning back in his comfortable chair and reflecting on his great success. The ex-offender was now a gloriously prosperous and well-liked member of the community. So good to be alive, he thought smugly to himself. His secretary announced that a Mr. Kronovich wished to see him and claimed to know him. Bill could not remember anyone with that strange foreign name, but he told her to show him in. An old man with a stick shuffled in, and Bill immediately recognised him as the old man who had harmed him twice. But Bill, as I have said, was now a reformed character and he stood up to greet the visitor with his usual urbane kindness. The old man returned his cordial reception with a gentle smile and seemed to grow younger and suaver before his eyes. “I am glad to see you prospering so well since we last met,” the not so old man said, “and I feel the time has come for a little chat. In fact, I don’t remember ever exchanging words with you; you never gave me a chance.”

  “So right,” Bill enthused, “you’re so right. I can only apologise for my unforgivable behaviour and should also thank you for all this,” he meaningfully swept his arm to indicate his office, his family, his life and perhaps his happiness; “if it hadn’t been for you, I might never have abandoned the worthless existence of my youth.”

  “Not at all,” replied the smiling man. “I’m sure you would have discovered the error of your ways, even without my intervention.”

  “Can you give me any news of my buddy?” Bill asked.

  “I’m afraid not. I seem to have lost all contact with him,” the now seated man beamed with mannerly tact.

  “Come on,” objected Bill, “I cannot believe that you can track me down and not him. That would make no sense.”

  “Well,” the man wriggled slightly in his chair, “shall we say that I have to respect professional confid
ences?”

  “Professional confidences?” Bill raised his voice. “But who are you? And how did you do those things?”

  “Sometimes it is best not to know everything. Knowledge can be a burden, you know. It can also be a disappointment. The unknown is exciting precisely because it is unknown. Listen, for instance, to a singing voice and enjoy those shivers it sends through your body. Now they want to isolate the tone and count up the hertz of the voice frequency so that they can then synthesise it for every singer. This simply deskills us and introduces us to the banality of the universe. Wasn’t it all so much more wonderful when we didn’t know?” He crossed his legs elegantly, stretched himself and smiled a smile that exactly reflected and inverted Bill’s own charming smile.

  “Who are you then? Are you God? Are you an angel? Or a devil? How can you change form? How can you appear and disappear at will?” Bill began to plead. “Please tell me or I shall never be at peace again.”

  “Ah, my dear fellow,” the man said, “please do not agitate yourself. A moment ago, you would have been happy with some news of your buddy, but now you want to know who I am, and that is not something I could possibly divulge.”