Mefisto

by Banville, John

  – And that coat! she cried. And the galoshes!

  His English was not good, it was hard to understand him. His accent made the things he said seem at once profound and quaint, like ancient pronouncements. He was very educated, he had studied everything, philosophy, science, oh, everything! He had given up all that now, though. Saying this, she put on a tragic face, as if she too had renounced weighty things in her time, and knew all about it. I thought of Mr Kasperl sitting alone by the blazing window in Black’s, glooming out at the town like a decrepit god overseeing a world, weary of his own handiwork, but stuck with it.

  – What is he doing here, anyway? my mother said. What does he want?

  She did not like at all the thought of these people moving into Ashburn, her Ashburn. Aunt Philomena frowned, pursing her vermilion mouth.

  – I don’t know that he wants anything, she said with dignity. What would he want, here?

  No one could answer that. She cast an arch glance about her.

  – In fact, she said, he’s something to do with mining …

  Jack Kay snorted.

  – Foreigner, is he? he said. Some class of a jewboy, if you ask me.

  The subject had provoked in him a mysterious, smouldering rage. Aunt Philomena delicately ignored him.

  – An engineer, I believe, she said mildly.

  – Engineer, my arse! Jack Kay shouted, and struck his fist on the arm of his rocking-chair.

  He glared around him. A dribble of spit had run down his chin. He sucked it up angrily. There was silence. Aunt Philomena cleared her throat and lifted her eyebrows, touching a fingertip to her blue-black perm, to the hem of her skirt, to the mole on her humid upper lip.

  – Well! she said softly, expelling a breath, and rose haughtily, like a ship’s figurehead, and swept out of the house.

  I WENT OUT TO Ashburn day after day, and crouched in the little grove above the sunlit meadow. It was there that the girl found me, as I hoped, no, as I knew she would, came up behind me without a sound one afternoon and put her hand on my shoulder. I turned, I could feel my face grinning madly. She stood very close to me, examining me intently with her eager, lopsided smile, and made a sort of mewling sound at the back of her throat. I felt as if I had come face to face with a creature of the wild, a deer, perhaps, or a large, delicate, fearless bird. I started to say something, but she shook her head, and touched a finger lightly to her ear and lips, to show me she was deaf, and could not speak.

  She stepped away from me through the young trees, looking back and gesturing for me to follow. I hesitated, and she nodded vigorously, beckoning and smiling. She wore the same flowered skirt she was wearing the first time I saw her, and a white blouse damp-stained at the armpits. We walked up the meadow. The day was hot, with a listless breeze. Everything seemed to quiver faintly, the air, the grass, the very trunks of the trees, as if all had been struck a huge, soft blow. I glanced at the girl and found her inspecting me avidly, her eyes gleaming and her smiling lips compressed, as if I were something she had caught, and intended to keep. The house, glimpsed through the trees, with the sun in its windows, flashed out at me its impassive signal. We came to a cart track and she took up a stick and scratched her name in the stony clay. Sophie. She pointed to herself, trying to say it, the pale pulp of her tongue lolling between her teeth.

  We came to the house, and climbed the steps to the front door. Sophie produced a huge iron key from a pocket of her skirt. In the hall a rhomb of sunlight basked on the floor, like a reclining acrobat. The wallpaper hung down in strips, stirring now in the draught from the doorway like bleached palm-fronds. There was a dry, brownish smell, as of something that had finished rotting and turned to dust. On the threshold a barrier seemed to part before me, an invisible membrane. The air was cool and dry. There was no sign of life. Dust lay everywhere, a mouse-grey, flocculent stuff, like a layer of felt, cushioning our footfalls. We went into a large, darkened room. The shutters were drawn, bristling with slanted blades of sunlight. There was a skitter of tiny claws in a corner, then silence. Sophie opened the shutters. The room greeted the sudden glare with a soundless exclamation of surprise. An armchair leaned back, its armrests braced, in an attitude of startlement and awe. We stood looking about us for a moment, then abruptly Sophie took my hand and drew me after her out of the room and up the wide staircase. She ran ahead of me through the shuttered bedrooms, flinging them open to the radiant day. She laughed excitedly, making gagging noises, her chin up and jaw thrust out as if to prevent something in her mouth from spilling over. I could still feel, like a fragment of secret knowledge, the cool moist print of her hand in mine. I followed her from window to window. The hinged flap of a shutter came away in my grasp like a huge, grey, petrified wing, another collapsed in a soft explosion of rotted wood and paint flakes and the brittle husks of woodworm larvae. Higher and higher we went, the house becoming a stylised outdoors around us, with all that light flooding in, and the high, shadowy ceilings the colour of clouds, and the windows thronging with greenery and sky.

  The attic was a warren of little low rooms opening on to each other like an image repeating itself into the depths of a mirror. It was hot and airless up here under the roof. Outside, swifts were shooting like random arrows in and out of the eaves. In what had been a schoolroom I put my hand to a globe of the world, and immediately, as if it had been biding its time, the lacquered ball fell off its stand and rolled across the floor with a tinny clatter. Sophie showed me a narrow room with a sloped ceiling and one circular window, like a wide-open eye. There was a bed, and a bentwood chair, and a washstand with a pitcher and a chipped, enamelled basin. Under a bare lightbulb two flies were lazily weaving the air. This was her room. The window held a view of treetops and far fields. We went along a dim corridor. I glanced through a half-open doorway and saw Mr Kasperl reclining on a vast, disordered bed in his waistcoat and boots, smoking a cigar and studying what appeared to be a large chart or map. Appeared to be, I like that. He looked at me briefly, without surprise, then turned back to his work.

  Sophie led the way downstairs again. Little tremors of excitement still ran through her. Now and then a tiny, high-pitched flute-note, like a restless sleeper’s sigh, flew up of its own accord out of her throat. She showed me things she had found about the place, an elaborate doll’s house, a dressmaker’s dummy on a stand, stark as an exclamation mark, a box of marionettes with tangled strings and splayed limbs, like a heap of miniature hanged men. She crawled on hands and knees into a closet under the stairs and dragged out a trunk of mouldering fancy-dress costumes. She watched me eagerly, with intensity, her eyes fixed on my face, my lips. Then she frowned, and pushed away the marionettes and shut the lid of the trunk, and sat back on her heels and sighed, as if these things, these dolls and dresses and bits of silk, were things she was telling me, and I was not responding. In a moment, though, she was up again and running down the hall, beckoning me to follow. She opened a heavy, studded door on to a little room rigged up as a photographic studio. The place was cluttered with parts of antique cameras and foxed packets of chemicals and stacks of glass negatives. The light was dense and still. Sophie sat down on a bench with a bundle of dog-eared, grainy prints in her lap. She patted the place beside her, inviting me to sit. There was a faint, feverish hum in the hot air, and a sharp, chemical tang. Gravely I examined the pictures as she passed them to me one by one. She had been through them before, she had her favourites, a close-up of a stout baby with the head of a blank-eyed caesar, a crooked shot of a donkey wearing a straw hat, a formal portrait of servants arrayed like an orchestra on the front steps of the house on some long-ago summer afternoon. Towards the bottom of the pile the subjects changed. Here was a back view of a large lady in a bustle leaning over a balcony, while behind her a whiskered gentleman gazed in lively surmise at a plump, cleft peach he was holding in his hand and about to bite. There were studies of the same couple, he in drooping leotard now and she stripped to her corset, posing on an ornate bed in pos
tures at once lewd and oddly decorous. There was something sad about them, these jet and pearl-grey ghosts, whose future was already our past. The final picture was of the woman alone. She sat naked astride a straight-backed chair, grinning into the camera, with her hands on her bulging hips and her legs thrust wide apart. Her sex, defenceless and thrilling, was like some intricate, tasselled creature brought up from the secret depths of the sea. I cleared my throat and looked sideways at Sophie. She was watching me again, with that intent, expectant smile. There were violet shadows under her eyes, and a faint, dark down on her upper lip. She had a milky odour, with something sharp in it, like the smell of crushed nettles. Her hair was a hot, heavy mass, I could sense it, the dark weight of it, the thickness. She put aside the pictures, and we left the studio and wandered into a large, long room with glass-fronted bookcases lining the walls and plaster mouldings on the ceiling. The bookcases were empty. French windows gave on to the glare of the sweltering day, making the room seem a vast, dim tent. There had been intruders here, there was a broken window-pane, and dead leaves on the carpet, and in the corner on the floor a huge, rusted turd. I opened wide the windows and stood looking out. Stone steps led down to a sunken garden with waist-high grass. The air throbbed, big with heat. A little brown bird flitted up into a tree without a sound. Sophie put a record on an ancient gramophone and cranked the handle. There was a splutter and a hiss, and a wobbly orchestra struck up a waltz. The music swayed out on the summer air, quaint and gay. She knelt in a sagging armchair, with her hands folded along the back of it and her chin on her hands, watching the disc go round and round. I wondered if she could feel the music, a kind of drunken buzzing in her head, as of someone a long way off playing on paper and comb. The waltz tottered to a close, and she took off the record and put it back carefully in its sleeve. I can see it still, that scene, the shiny arm of the gramophone, curved and fat like the arm of a baby, and the chrome nipple twinkling at the centre of the turntable, and Sophie’s slender hands lifting the record. What else? The way the turntable continued spinning silently, with comic, breakneck haste, like a dog chasing its tail. What else? The burgundy-red label of the record. The picture on the label of the little dog chasing its tail, no, listening, with one ear cocked. What else? The brown-paper sleeve, with one corner turned down. What else? What else?

  Felix was sitting in the kitchen, sorting through a collection of old keys of all shapes and sizes spread before him on the table. The room was narrow, with a high ceiling and low windows, their sills level with an unruly patch of lawn outside. There was a chipped sink, and an angry-looking, soot-black stove. The sink was stacked with soiled crockery, and something was bubbling sluggishly in a battered pot on the stove. Felix looked at me and grinned.

  – Well, he said, if it isn’t Sweetsir Swansir. Can’t keep away from us, eh?

  Sophie peered into the steaming stewpot and wrinkled her nose. She brought plates and mugs and set them out on the table, shoving Felix’s keys unceremoniously to one side. He leaned back with a lazy sigh, studying me idly, one arm hitched over the back of his chair and his thin mouth stretched in a smile. I heard a step behind me. Mr Kasperl had appeared in the doorway.

  – And the dead arose and appeared to many! Felix murmured.

  The fat man sat down at the table, lowering his bulk heavily on to the chair, which cried out in protest under him. He gouged a knuckle into his eyes, then sat gazing blearily at his plate.

  – Had a little rest, did we? Felix shouted playfully, wagging his head at him across the table. Had a little kip?

  Sophie brought the saucepan from the stove and ladled a smoking dollop of dark-brown stew on to each plate. Felix waved an arm expansively, inviting me to join them. I sat down opposite Mr Kasperl.

  Sophie poured out tea from a blackened pot. There was a little nest of cobwebs in the bottom of my mug. Mr Kasperl coughed moistly one, twice, and then a third time, inclining an ear, as if testing something inside him. The heat hummed, pressing on the house. Birds were singing weakly outside. The high, narrow room teetered above us, as if we were at the bottom of a deep shaft. A scalded spider bobbed to the surface of my tea, turning in slow circles. I felt Mr Kasperl’s gaze directed at me. We looked at each other for a moment. I fancied I could see something stirring, like torpid fish, in the dead depths of his eyes. He stopped chewing suddenly, and, puckering his lips, extracted a piece of gristle from his mouth and set it down with deliberation on the side of his plate. I looked away. Sophie was watching me, and so was Felix. They were all three watching me, with calm and somehow remote attention, as if they had turned to look back at me from the far side of a valley, waiting to see if I would come across and join them.

  I MET FELIX IN town one day. He came ambling along Owl Street with his hands in his pockets, whistling. I felt a spasm of that same excitement, a sort of eager fright, that I had felt the first time I saw him, in the grove above the meadow. I thought of turning aside, but he had already seen me. The street was narrow and steep, running athwart a hill above the harbour. The spire of the Church of the Assumption beetled over the rooftops, seeming somehow in flight. There was a smell of sea-wrack, and a gamy stench from a poulterer’s yard up a lane.

  – Hello, whooper, he said. Going my way?

  – No, I said, I …

  – Oh well, I’ll go yours, then.

  He grinned.

  We walked down the hill towards the harbour. Sunlight lay along one side of the street, wedged at the foot of a deep diagonal of shadow. Few people were about. An old man in rags was crossing the road on a crutch. At each laborious step he brought his left foot down on the asphalt with an angry bang. He stopped in the gutter and waited intently, panting, as we went past. From this high place we could look out over the town, a huddle of dark geometry spread before us in the summer haze. Felix paused, and took a cigarette butt from his box and fingered it thoughtfully, picking charred crumbs of tobacco from the blackened tip.

  – I’ve been talking to your auntie, he said. She says you’re a wizard with figures.

  He struck a match and held the flame suspended, and glanced at me sideways.

  – That right? he said.

  Out in the harbour a marker bell was ringing and ringing. I could feel the blood flooding into my face. I walked on quickly, and Felix followed. Behind me the cripple banged his hoof, and, unless I imagine it, laughed.

  We turned into Goat Alley. Already Felix knew his way about these back streets. He steered me across a sunny yard behind a fishmonger’s shop and down a narrow flight of slimed stone steps. A rat scuttled ahead of us, dragging a fish-head in its teeth. We came abruptly on to the quayside. The sea was high, swaying sluggishly beyond the woodworks like the smooth pale humped back of something living. A bronze pikeman, sombrely agleam in the sunlight, pointed a rope-veined forearm in the direction of the railway station. We crossed to the woodworks. Beneath us we could hear the tide’s vague slap and slither. Felix threw his fag-end into the water, it made a tiny hiss. In the harsh sea-light the whites of his eyes were soiled, and the skin around his eyes was taut, as if from a scorching, and scored with tiny wrinkles like cracks in a china glaze. The breeze brought me a waft of his breath, laden with the smell of smoke and the metallic tang of his bad teeth. I could smell his clothes too, with the sun on them, the shiny, pinstriped jacket with its prolapsed pockets and wilting lapels, the concertina trousers, the shoes like boats.

  – Mr Kasperl was asking about you, he said. Wanted to know who you were. I told him. I said, he’s a prodigy, that boy. He was interested.

  – Why, I said, why was he asking about me?

  – Eh? Oh, I don’t know. The subject came up. Listen, here’s a good one. How does a lady hold her liquor? By the ears. Ha!

  We walked on. Our footsteps thudded on the tarred boards, the sea sucked and slapped. Felix talked and talked. He put on his funny voices, did impressions, recounted queer stories. He talked about the war, about the Germans and the Japs, and the sulphur bo
mbs that were dropped on Dresden. He knew all the facts, the figures. He stopped suddenly and struck a pose, with one hand on his heart and the other pointing heavenward, and gaily sang:

  Oh, the Jews nailed Jesus,

  But Jesus screwed the Jews!

  He speculated about the last secret of Fatima, which is so terrible the Pope keeps it sealed in a vault in the Vatican. Maybe, he said, maybe it had something to do with the three dark days that will herald the end of the world, when nothing will light except blessed candles made of beeswax. He clapped his hands and cackled.

  – Get that candle out! he cried. As the Mother Superior said to the nun.

  We left the quay and walked up through the town. The main street was busy. Felix smiled on everything, as if all this, the streets, the people, the shop windows decked with corsets and carpenter’s tools, had been laid on specially for his amusement. The housewives doing their shopping eyed us with interest. They all knew Felix. He greeted them genially, waving and bowing, doffing an imaginary tri-corn, and all the while making disparaging remarks to me about them out of the side of his mouth. We passed by the malt store, and the place where the Horse River ran under the road, and so came to our square. We stopped under the trees, by the horse trough, a metal tub surmounted by an iron swan painted white, that spouted a weak jet of water through a rusted beak.

  – Swan, Felix said, pointing. Ha ha.

  This was where, years ago, the dwarf used to sit on his tricycle and talk to me, smoothing a hand on his oiled hair and shooting his immaculate cuffs. Felix lounged against the trough, his arms and ankles crossed. Suddenly I wanted to tell him something, anything, to confide in him, the urge was so strong that for a second tears prickled under my eyelids and my throat grew thick. He was watching me with a little smile, his eyes narrowed against the light.