Mefisto

by Banville, John

  – I hate him, she said. That hair. The way he walks, as if he had no backbone.

  I knew who she meant.

  Suddenly she laughed, a brief, psittacine cry. Then she frowned, and stood up quickly and pressed the bell. The drunk mumbled in his sleep. We alighted at a deserted corner, under a leaning lamp. There was a bit of broken wall painted blue, and a high rickety wooden fence with things scrawled on it, names and curses and hearts with arrows in them, and a bulbous, cleft woman drawn in chalk. Adele looked about her with a preoccupied expression, clutching her handbag to her narrow chest. Her lips were black in the lamplight. The silence of the night arranged itself around us.

  – Is this where you live? I said.

  She looked at me in surprise.

  – No, she said. Why?

  A dull pain throbbed in my right arm, like an old dog yanking at the leash. I swallowed a pill.

  – Where do you get them, she said, those?

  I offered her one. An Oread, the last of my supply. She examined it, and put it in her mouth and swallowed it carefully, as if it were not a pill but a bit of my pain itself I had given her. For a second time she looked at me directly.

  – Gabriel, she said. Is that your name?

  She never smiled. She had only that laugh, and now and then a sort of grin, wild-eyed, distraught. There was a bus coming on the other side. She put her head down and walked away from me quickly across the road, the heels of her white shoes tap-tapping the asphalt. The headlights of the bus caught her briefly. She got on board and it churned away, trumpeting, into the darkness.

  I went down the quays again next morning, but everything looked different by day, I could not find that corner with the blue wall and the wooden fence. The cranes and the blank sides of the warehouses had the look of things turned away, smirking in derision.

  Felix came with me to the hospital for my weekly visit. We had to wait a long time, sitting in a row of wooden benches in the outpatients’ hall. There were mothers with cowed children, raw-faced young men in suits, and doll-like girls with impossible hairstyles, their mouths painted scarlet. All stared before them with the same expression of mingled boredom, disbelief and fear. At intervals a door in front of us would open and a nurse would appear and call out a name, and a boy in splints would get up, or a rheum-eyed old fellow with the shakes, and shuffle forward meekly. Then all would shift, sliding sideways, and the one at the end of each row would nip into the place vacated on the bench in front. Felix laughed.

  – Like a little chapel, he said. And we’re all going to confession.

  He sat at ease with his legs crossed and one arm draped along the back of the bench, smiling about him at the whey-faced coughers and the painted girls. He nudged me and whispered:

  – What a bunch, eh?

  When my turn came he rose eagerly to accompany me, but the nurse prevented him. He got to the threshold of the consulting room, and managed a good look inside before the door was shut in his face.

  – Such cheek! the nurse said.

  But she smiled all the same.

  The place was busy as always, assistants in white coats walking about hurriedly with files under their arms, the consultants at their tables, magisterially bored, half listening to whispered tales of frights and night-sweats and sudden, astounding pains. An old chap was being weighed, standing atremble on the scales, clutching the waistband of his trousers in a bony fist. In a curtainless cubicle a fat old biddy sat on the side of the bed fumbling with her suspenders, while a nurse stood by, tapping one foot. Dr Cranitch looked at me blankly, then consulted his file.

  – Ah, yes, he said. Swan. How is it?

  I showed him my arms, my shins. The grafts had held, new skin was spreading, a roseate lichen. He nodded, humming. I asked him for a prescription. He pursed his lips and looked past me as if he had not heard.

  – I can’t sleep, I said.

  He nodded.

  – Perhaps, he said absently, you’re meant to stay awake.

  He flexed my right arm, studying the action of the joint.

  – Much pain?

  I didn’t answer. He let go my arm, and leaned over my file and wrote in it, in his slow, meticulous hand.

  – You can lead a normal life, he said. There is no reason not to.

  He didn’t look up. He had a way of speaking, toneless and dispassionate, as if he were alone, trying out the words just to see how they sounded.

  – Give me a prescription, I said. Help me.

  But he went on writing, slowly, carefully.

  – I have helped you, he murmured.

  Felix was not in the waiting room. I found him in the corridor, smoking. He asked me what the doctor had said, and when I told him he cackled, and threw his fag-end on the floor and trod on it. Then we went upstairs, and matron gave me a pocketful of pills. She looked at Felix in silence. He grinned. On the way out he said:

  – That stuff, she just gives it to you, does she, no record of it or anything?

  November rain in the streets, the traffic fuming and snorting. He liked to hear about the hours I had spent on the operating table, about the tinfoil bandages, the swabs and the scissors. He would wince, gritting his teeth and shutting one eye, waving his hands at me, pretending he wanted me to stop.

  – But they brought you back to life, he said. And then you met up with me again. You see how things fall out? The Lord tempers the wind to the shorn lamb.

  The lights were on at noon in the flat. Professor Kosok was pacing the cluttered front room. He wore black tubular trousers, boots with laces, a greasy bow-tie. He had an angry, waddling walk, his fat legs jerked, he twitched his arms, as if he were constricted at the groin, the armpits. He fixed me with his clouded small dark eyes. Adele sat in an armchair by the fireplace, wearing her plastic raincoat, leaning forward intently with her arms folded on her knees, staring at the single bar of the electric fire in the grate. There were dark shadows under her eyes. The fire had brought out a diamond pattern on her shins. An ashtray beside her on the floor was full.

  – Well! said Felix happily, looking around at us and rubbing his hands. Here we are again!

  Adele showed me places in the city I had never noticed, walled gardens in the midst of office blocks, odd-shaped little courtyards, an overgrown cemetery between a bakery and a bank. She walked quickly through the streets, canted forward a little, her sharp little face thrust out. Now and then she would stop and look about her searchingly, as if to verify something, some detail of the scene. She hardly spoke to me, glancing sidelong at my knees. We went into the big department stores and wandered along the brightly lit aisles, gazing in silence at the racks of gaudy clothes and toiletries and packaged foods as if they were artefacts in a museum, the works of an immemorial golden age. People stared at us, children tugged at their mothers’ skirts and pointed, avid and agape. Adele took no notice. She lived in the city as if she were alone in it, as if it were somehow hers, a vast, windswept pleasure garden, deserted and decayed.

  We dined in cheap cafés, sitting at plastic tables behind fogged windows, amid the smells of boiled tea and fried bread and fags. I watched the people around us, the raw-eyed lorry drivers, the dumpy girls with dyed blonde hair and laddered stockings, the gaunt, watchful young men in raincoats too small for them. They ate with a kind of dogged circumspection, crouching over their plates, their jaws working in a rhythmic, circular motion. They had a dull, shocked look about them, as if they were survivors of some enormous accident. Covertly I studied Adele too, her pinched, heart-shaped face, her chilblained hands. She hardly ate at all, but smoked without pause, drinking cups of thin, grey coffee. When she put the cigarette to her mouth she shut one eye, as if in pain, and drew in deeply, with a harsh little sigh. Sometimes she would talk, quietly, with intensity, her eyes fixed on the steamy window beside her. People followed her, she said, men stalked her at night through the streets, sat beside her on buses and touched her, murmuring things. A woman with red hair had come up behind her one da
y and cursed her, shrieking and spitting in her face. Then there were the tramps, the tinkers with their wild eyes, looking at her. A negro had stood behind her in a crowded shop and pressed himself against her.

  – He had perfume on him, she said. The palms of his hands were pink.

  Then she gave her high bird-cry of a laugh, and fixed me with that fraught, off-centre stare.

  I showed her my old haunts, the alleys and archways, the streets by the river, the clay paths along the canal, where I had stalked the beggars and the madmen in those first, heady days of an autumn that now seemed an age ago. She grew restless, turning vaguely this way and that, as if she were looking for a way to escape. Sometimes still she would walk away from me abruptly, as on that first night on the quays, and jump on board a bus, or disappear down a sidestreet. She did it not from anger, or even rudeness, I think it was just that now and then my presence beside her somehow slipped her mind. I might not see her at all for days on end. I don’t know where she went. She must have had a room somewhere. She insisted she did not live at the flat in Chandos Street, though she often stayed there, sleeping in one or other of the dingy back bedrooms. She kept her things there too, dispersed among the general clutter. There was a suitcase stuffed with clothes, which would make its way from the bedrooms through the front room to the hall, and then all the way back again. Everything shifted around like this, the professor’s belongings too, the place always seemed as if a large untidy family had just moved in, or was about to move out. Adele picked her way through the jumble with her sleepwalker’s frown, as if she had been looking for something and had forgotten what it was. One evening she showed me her syringe, a big old-fashioned thing with a calibrated glass barrel and a plunger with a steel thumb-hole. It had its own special box, like a jewel case, with a lid that snapped shut, and dark-blue velvet lining.

  – He got it for me, she said.

  We leaned over it, our foreheads almost touching, contemplating it in silence. Then she sighed and shut the lid on it, and took it with her out of the room. I stood at the big front window. The winter evening was drawing in. I could hear the distant blare of rush-hour traffic. The remains of one of her cigarettes smouldered in an ashtray on the mantelpiece. She never managed to extinguish the stubs completely, no matter with what force she crushed them out, her mouth working.

  She was in the big, bare room at the back of the house. There was a narrow bed in a corner, a single dim bulb dangling from the ceiling. A gas fire hissed. The great windows were curtainless, looking out on a drab confusion of gardens. Night like a dark gas was seeping down on the city out of a luminous, mauve sky. She sat on the side of the bed, her head bowed, one hand hanging, the other resting palm upward across her knees. She had taken off her dress. One strap of her slip had fallen down her shoulder. She lifted her head when I came in, and cast about her vaguely, with a blank gaze. She ran a hand through her hair.

  – I cut it all off, she said, one time. It grew back.

  She blinked, frowning, and shook her head. Then she stood up, and drew the slip over her head and let it trickle through her fingers to the floor. Frail wrists, frail ankles, meagre flanks. Her delicate, glimmering shoulders. She had a plaster on one of her toes, where a chilblain had burst. She walked here and there about the room, shedding the rest of her things absent-mindedly as she went. She looked strange to me now, that known head on this unfamiliar, thin, almond-white body. There was a little triangular space between her legs, below the smudge of black hair. She lit a cigarette. When I touched her she turned quickly, startled. Her mouth was open, I kissed her clumsily, tasting smoke. She did not shut her eyes.

  She turned off the light, and we lay down together on the narrow bed. She was trembling. Gradually the dim shapes of the room came forward out of the darkness, like creatures gathering silently around us. She clasped me tightly in her arms, yet at the same time seemed to hold me off from her, as if part of her attention were elsewhere, concentrating on something beyond me. The sheet was clammy. I was cold, and burning. My hands shook. I licked her eyelids, her armpits, I put my tongue into her ears, her navel, into the cool little cup at the base of her throat. When I made to delve in her lap, however, she drew away from me, and there was a sudden, frightening silence. Cautiously I tried again, but again she drew back. She would not be penetrated, at least not where I wanted most to penetrate her, and at last, with an impatient sigh, she turned away from me.

  She lay on the edge of the bed, crouched and tense, staring away into the darkness like an animal listening, ready for danger. I held one of her cold, small breasts in my hand, my mouth was pressed to the nape of her neck. Her skin had a tawny, schoolgirl smell. I was shivering. The evening was still. The windows stared out into the darkness in blank amazement. An aeroplane flew over, its engines laboriously beating, I glimpsed its ruby wing-light sailing across the corner of the window above us. I was thinking of a moment from long ago, when I was a child, there was nothing in it, I don’t know why I remembered it, just a moment on a bend on a hill road somewhere, at night, in winter, the wet road gleaming, and dead leaves spinning, and the light from a streetlamp shivering in the wind. Absence, I suppose, the forlorn weight of all that was not there, I suppose that’s what I was remembering.

  We dressed in silence. The gas fire sang its tiny song. My hands still trembled. Adele paced, frowning, from room to room, looking for something. She was hungry, she announced. We went out, and she bought a bag of chips, and stood on the pavement outside the chip shop and devoured them, her eyes fixed in concentration on the ground before her, as if she were feeding not herself, but some starving thing inside her.

  We went for a walk. It was a raw night, tempestuous and clear. A full moon dived and wallowed amid scudding clouds. We saw a fight outside a pub, and met a little woman pushing a little dog in a doll’s pram. On a patch of waste ground a family of meths drinkers sat around a fire like a circle of decayed stone statues. We stood on a bridge and watched a barge slide past beneath us, dark and silent, on the dark river. When we got back to Chandos Street the sick-looking young man was there, waiting on the corner, huddled in his coat against the wind, with his scrawny girl beside him. He attempted a sporty grin, his mouth twitching.

  – Hello, chief, he said. Any stuff tonight? Listen, we’re in a bad way, real sick.

  I offered him a phial of Lemures. He snatched it from me, but when he read the label I thought he would weep.

  – Not that, he said, that’s no good. That other gear, you know? Like the last time?

  He was sweating. The girl began to whimper. He turned and shouted at her to shut up, his voice cracking. Adele had walked on, with her head down.

  – I haven’t any, I said, backing away from him.

  He came after me, rooting in the pockets of his coat, and brought out a wristwatch and thrust it under my nose.

  – I’ll give you this, he said. See, this? It’s gold.

  I put a hand in his chest and pushed him away. He stood, crestfallen, watching me retreat. He gave a sort of sob and stamped his foot.

  – Christ, pal …

  Adele was at the door. As I came up the steps she went inside and shut it quietly in my face.

  FELIX WAYLAID ME one evening in the hall. There was something he wanted to say to me, it was time we had a talk. A door opened above us somewhere, he took my arm and drew me hastily behind him down a gloomy passageway beside the stairs. We stepped out into a yard. There were dustbins, and a dank smell. He peered over his shoulder cautiously, then winked at me, digging his tremulous claws into my arm.

  – Have to be careful, he said. He’s always on the watch.

  – Who?

  He laughed.

  – Who? Who do you think?

  I followed him down the narrow garden. Everything was overgrown with bindweed and briars. Tall skeletons of last year’s thistles stuck up starkly. The backs of houses rose all around us. The sky was still light. A new moon was visible above the chimney-pots. Felix put his ha
nds in his pockets and stopped to survey the scene.

  – There is order in everything, he said. Isn’t it wonderful? Look at this place. It seems a wilderness, but underneath it all there’s a garden.

  He looked at me sidelong, smiling.

  – What do you say?

  I said:

  – I don’t know.

  He took my arm again.

  – Oh but you do, you do know, you of all people.

  We walked along a weed-grown path, and came upon a dark pool overhung by a stunted, bare tree. Dim forms moved in the depths of the water. We stopped, and leaned to look, and slowly the fish floated up, like something in a dream, lifting weak, hopeful mouths, their pallid fins feebly beating the moss-brown water. Felix’s face grinned up at me, with a fish-mouth for an eye.

  – What are numbers, after all? he said. Music, that kind of thing, it’s all sums, isn’t it?

  The bronze reflection of a cloud sailed on to the surface of the water, the arabian moon was there too, a horned sliver, glimmering. The fish sank again slowly, into the deeps.

  – Come on, Felix said, let’s go for a stroll. I have to see a man about a horse.

  Dusk was settling in the streets, the lamps were coming on. There was a bitter wind, and patches of damp on the pavements. We walked by the railings of the square, under the dark trees. Felix pointed to the gutter.

  – Ever wonder, he said, who it is removes squashed cats from the road? There was one run over there this morning, now it’s gone.

  He halted, cupping a hand to his ear. Music sounded faintly in the distance, a tinny blare.

  – Hark! he said. The herald angels.

  The office workers were going home, flitting like shadows through the brumous twilight, hurrying away to their unimaginable lives. We crossed the road, past great pillared arches and granite façades, and turned in the direction of the river. Two figures in long overcoats stood under a lamp-post, examining a bottle in a brown paper bag. Water was bubbling out of a crack in the paving where a pipe had burst. For an instant suddenly I saw into the dark heart of things, and a surge of mad glee rose in my gullet like waterbrash.