It was not only the recollection of the American girl’s assertion that made me tingle inside. Florence, New Year’s Eve, a quarter of a century ago, she had long black hair and was wearing a red duffle coat, just like Paddington, and perhaps that was why I thought of her as a small bear, I’ve never been able to resist that kind of button, wooden and oblong, buttoned crosswise.
Back to Lisbon. Our hotel room was stained with damp, just like the rest of the hotel. When I plugged my blow-dryer in to the outlet, I could use it to switch the lights in my room on and off, but I could not make it blow. And there was a mirror in which you could faintly discern yourself, and each other – naked and locked in an embrace we appeared, Charles and Camilla, duly flattered, only contours, somewhere deep inside the rusty night of the mirror while (we were doing it all the time, we were probably doing it all the while) the aeroplanes flew into the towers. Afterwards, hungry from all of that love, we left the room and I struck a key as always, perhaps ‘d’ for disaster that day, and we walked with our arms around each other, hungry and happy along the dangerous corridor and down the dangerous staircase, the lift was simply too dangerous, even for soldiers of fortune like ourselves. Downstairs in reception, one of the Indian owners emerged from his room under the staircase, said something to Charles and tugged at his sleeve. He was tugged into the room. And I followed. He was visibly agitated about something on TV. I saw a mass of smoke and assumed it was a forest fire.
‘No, we are not interested in seeing a film right now,’ Charles said in a friendly tone, because he is always friendly, and tugged his sleeve back.
‘It’s not a film,’ I said, ‘I think the forests in his native country are on fire.’
‘Argh,’ Charles said, leaning forward and stroking the Indian on the cheek, ‘I’m sure everything will turn out all right.’
The Indian was at a complete loss. In the end he let us go with a shrug. And without realizing it, we stepped out into a world transformed. But of course people do that all the time. I would hate to overestimate the significance of the event: so much evil has happened prior to and since then, and perhaps society would have isolated itself anyway. And perhaps we would have isolated ourselves out of anxiety anyway. Perhaps the collapse of the Twin Towers was just an opportunity. That’s what Charles thinks, for example. Unfortunately I am unable to produce an independent, an original political analysis; I’m not trained for that so I rely on and repeat what I have heard and read. Good thing I have my newspaper. Good thing I have Žižek. And not least, good thing I have Charles. And good thing I have Alwilda, too. She is tough.
I was riding my bike one day when I got stopped by a journalist, asking if I could explain why I wore a helmet. How many answers could there be? But in an attempt to surprise him, I told him I was afraid of something falling on my head. ‘From above?’ he asked. ‘From above,’ I repeated. ‘I belong to a nation of nervous Nellies, we’re scared of everything these days.’
‘Would you mind confining your reasons to you,’ he said.
‘No,’ I replied, ‘I would prefer that. Long before 9/11, I began to fear the worst. Always. The only thing I’m not afraid of is salmonella. I eat raw eggs with complete disregard for death.’
‘I’m hearing and writing disregard for death,’ he said, ‘but we’re not talking about eggs. Although, an egg landing on the kitchen floor and a head landing on the asphalt, of course they can be compared.’
And then he rushed off, with the idea of opening his short feature on cycle helmets with a slow motion shot of an egg being smashed against a hard surface. How he ran. So nobody would steal his idea.
Let’s talk about flowers then, I say (the journalist is gone). I am sitting directly in front of a bunch of almost black-red gladioli at home in our living room and I wonder what it would be like to walk inside such a velvet funnel. Now don’t go thinking this is about female genitalia, caution, this is about death again. Walk inside such a funnel of velvet, turn around and watch it close behind you. Be surrounded, enclosed, suffocated in a delightful scent, with soft walls, and be allowed to die a flowery death.
But where does it come from, I ask myself, and sometimes Alwilda asks me that too, and Charles, this circling around death. For a long time I could not come up with an answer. I shrugged, turned away and decided to keep death to myself in the future. As though it was my problem alone, mine and only mine. For that reason I was happy when I found a possible answer in V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival one day.
I learnt the piece by heart, and the next time Alwilda asked me, I replied: ‘To see the possibility, the certainty of ruin, even at the moment of creation: it was my temperament. Those nerves had been given me as a child in Trinidad, partly by our family circumstances: the half-ruined or broken-down houses we lived in, our many moves, our general uncertainty…’
‘Trinidad,’ Alwilda said in disbelief, ‘but we lived in Jægersborg the entire time, and your home was so nice, it was certainly no ruin.’
‘The uncertainty,’ I said sombrely,’ the uncertainty, the furniture was shifted round a lot, for long periods at a time I was put out to graze with relatives, there was much illness, my life was abruptly turned upside down, people arrived and departed.’
‘Yes, childhood is a quagmire,’ Alwilda said, ‘you get stuck. Every single day I blindly repeat what others have told me. Who is speaking through me now? I ask myself, is it my dear mum or my dear sweet granddad, who was it now that got ill from having cobwebs on the broom, who was it now that shouted at me when I swept the webs off the ceilings and forgot to clean the broom, with something resembling mouldy porridge stuck to the bristles. And now it is my turn. I don’t care what the broom looks like. But when Daniel forgets to clean the broom after sweeping up, a shout escapes me (nonetheless)…’
‘Isn’t it a little simplistic to fall back on the idea that someone is speaking through you? Shouldn’t we take responsibility for what we say?’
‘But now that someone is being spoken through. First I have left – yes, what have I left – the figure of my granddad shouting at me. And then, when I am shouted through, am I also meant to take responsibility for that?’
‘At least you have the pleasure of shouting at Daniel.’
‘Who will then shout at another person who will shout at …’
II. CAMILLA AND THE REST OF THE PARTY
‘He had a bestial relation to literature as though it were the sole source of animal warmth. He warmed himself by the side of literature, he rubbed up against its coat with his bristly red hair and unshaven cheeks. He was a Romulus who hated the she-wolf which gave him suck, and hating, he taught others to love her…’
— Osip Mandelstam describing his teacher V. V. Gippius
CAMILLA AND THE REST OF THE PARTY
[Camilla]
Charles is ill. He is the one that pain rides. This is the second year. He takes morphine. I sit on a chair by his bed every night – not even on the edge of the bed, because he cannot cope with the mattress sloping – and gets terribly impatient. Or restless. I have a hard time staying seated for long periods at a time. And depressed. And very upset to see his pain-ridden face. I am not good at being the next of kin. I feel sorry for myself, at the turn life has taken. And for him, most of all, the one ridden with pain.
On the odd occasion that Charles gets up, I sometimes throw myself onto the bed where he lay, in an attempt to try to mull over the situation, and as I do, I view the room from his position – see what he is surrounded with every day. Still on the table are the gifts this week’s visitors have brought, a jar with a brown label dangling from a fiery-red bow: ‘Alwilda’s Strawberry Jam with Cumin,’ there’s some tea, and a silk pillow towering there, all gifts from young women with sunny dispositions; a little to the right are the dark gentlemanly things – rum and bitter chocolate.
The windowsill is lined with flowers and rocks, and there are a number of red items, a red plaid blanket over the back of a chair, a red glass on the t
able. The yellow orchids do not have the dead waxen characteristic that orchids often have, there is a swarm of small light flowers, and the height of the plants (nearly a metre) and the colour of the flowers (warm yellow) with the grey sky as a backdrop, makes you think of the yoga routine, Sun Salutation, where a person sits and salutes by stretching their arms high in the air. My maths tutor (at secondary school) tried to teach it to me, he struggled to cross my stiff calves over my thighs, into the lotus position, it felt like sitting on a see-saw. In the corner of the room is the rocking chair that he seduced Alma in, its seat and back are made of wicker, it was given a new seat, there were holes in the old one. The upstairs neighbour has a golden Buddha in the windowsill facing the street, in our windowsill Ganesha is standing with a rat, also visible from the street. Approaching the property, you would think you were approaching a couple of sanctuaries: Hindus on the ground floor, Buddhists on the first floor. Charles loves flowers. Charles loves rocks. I have an equally difficult time with rocks as with the sky – I stare and wait for something to happen, but nothing happens, and after a moment I give up. Or I just send short, dutiful looks at rocks, at stars. I have a strong desire and an expectation for something to happen inside me during my encounters with the world.
We, Charles and I, used to characterise our love with the words ‘speed, motion and momentum’. We never thought we would get stuck. Now we are. ‘Locked,’ visibly, just like something in his back, him to the bed, me to the chair by the bed.
The morphine has taken away Charles’s appetite, he lives on oranges. First his stomach became as flat as that of a young man, and I stroked it with desire. Now he is practically hollow. I lean over him gingerly – I need to be an angel or some other winged presence so that I can float above him weightlessly, touch him without making the pain worse – and kiss him and I am terrified that he will disappear from me entirely, ‘ow, ow, ow,’ he says. Back to the chair. I have become a sister. I recall: Torremolinos, God knows what year exactly, but there was an air of hippyness to it, and we were all reading The Drifters (it was passed round between us) by James A. Michener, that was why we were in Torremolinos, one of the chapters was set there, and that was why we later travelled to Marrakech (and then returned to Torremolinos just like in the book) where we arrived in moonlight, and I provoked my boyfriend, Tim was his name, by saying that the walls and the ground were yellow, not red, the red walls of Marrakech, as Michener had described so enticingly, and which at long last we now stood by. Alas, all of this because I sit looking at Charles’s brown pill bottles remembering a man with brown hair (who constantly had to toss his head back to get the long fringe out of his eyes, was missing a couple of teeth and must have had a name like Jimmy) with a guitar on one of the beaches, very quietly singing ‘Tell me, sister morphine, when are you coming round again,’ and I thought: yes, that’s how it is, (‘it’ likely meaning life – but actually things are only like that now, just under twenty years later (now: morphine & immense pain that I am a neighbour to here on the chair) while at the same time feeling left out and, quite rightly, like a complete idiot. My self-consciousness made me quiet as a clam; but within my muteness I kicked against the pricks – against the idea that there was something wrong with me, even though I was unable to fit in with the crowd.
I was envious of those who were happy and easy-going. In particular a Norwegian girl whose laughter rose and fell as she played ball, wearing only knickers and with a couple of long hairs (though blonde) poking out from one nipple; she had been an intravenous drug user and saw it as her new mission in life to smuggle hash into Norway – to somewhere far north where she came from, to give young people there an alternative to heroin, which was much easier to smuggle, and for that reason it was far cheaper and more accessible (she explained to us in a rare moment of gravity) – swaddled in packages around her tall Norwegian waist, maybe around her legs too. I remember that her legs were not even that long. It occurs to me that the one time we were alone together (which was easier for me than being in a crowd, I kept seeing myself from the outside, and it cast an enormous damper on me: it meant that there were two of me and I found myself walking in a never-ending circle, treading on my own toes) and in an attempt at intimacy (which maybe I was able to reciprocate, maybe not) she told me about a house she had lived in, along with several other junkies, where they had slept in one big pile and every night they would simply reach out for whoever was closest, from somewhere deep inside ‘the blind night of intoxication,’ and I envisaged a Hieronymus Bosch scenario, it was also the first time I heard the Norwegian words for cock and cunt. And I should not have begrudged her for all the happiness available to her. But I did.
She was with a German named Uwe who spent his life in a VW Breadloaf, he was such a warm and beautiful person, with long, thick curls and a laugh that went on so long that I seized up, that is, moved a notch below my base condition – like a clam. And I had an unpleasant feeling that my mere presence, my essence, was placing a damper on the group; once in a while they looked at me with concern. Of course, it was frisbee she was playing, or they were playing frisbee, the happy Norwegian and the happy German, the beautiful couple, one fair, the other dark, that is whenever they were not simply bent over the hooka (which for my part definitively and conclusively severed my connection with the group, as I sailed off in a darkness of grief and regret. A little later when they slipped down to the beach to get high on LSD, they were clever enough to leave me in the VW, which (by the way) Uwe had placed at his girlfriend’s disposal for her project. They collected the hash in Morocoo, hid it behind the hubcaps and in a couple of hollowed-out surfboards that were secured to the roof, and I don’t know whether I came down one day and saw her preparing to leave with all the packages fastened to her body with thick tape, or whether that was something I saw in a film) and he shouted ‘Go for it, Cathy,’ with glittering teeth; and maybe later he would lean his magnificent German bite over her breast and snip off the hair. Or not. Because what was there was natural. Just as she burped when she had to – in a straightforward and graceful way, like a small and lovely sound had been released inside a seashell and now rolled between its mother-of-pearl walls.
After a couple of months I managed to tear myself away – it felt like I was glued to the spot, and in all that time by the sea, in the southern sun, I had not bathed, neither in the sea nor the sun, I was liable to fits of monological rage (with my family as the focal point), which the hash had clearly unlocked, and which kept going, for years – without additional fuel, a kind of perpetual motion machine of the mind.
‘Here comes the spring,’ I said to Charles as I walked past his bed with a yellow glass vase (I had just bought) and placed it on the table where he could see it. At Østre Anlæg, the slopes are yellow with buttercups. The vase is more of an old-fashioned yellow colour, however that is supposed to be understood. I also bought one for Alma. Now, as I sit by Charles’s bed, I keep turning to look at it. The colour is outright soothing.
Later the forsythia arrive, but perhaps yellow is not comforting, but a sheer maddening energy; because Charles just lies there. Charles just cries or turns away. And now the mirabelle is powdery white, in long white strokes with all that brownness still around it. Charles turns over and says, so that was how life turned out.
‘Who knows what constitutes a life,’ I say, it sounds matter-of-fact, you would not think it was the title of a book by Ashbery.
Outside the miracle continues, the colours rise from the brownness; the miracle continues to be miraculous, year after year, and the older you get, the more you seem to love the spring, it is the coldness of the grave in the bones that this love comes from. There stands the tree, Charles, with lead weights dangling from his arms, a pendulum round his neck, no, he has become a grandfather clock, a staggering and bandy one. He stands as though on a sloping floor. And the mirabelle loses all its leaves in a single night.
We have two pairs of boxing gloves, mostly for decoration now, but once,
in another lifetime, Charles used to box with his two sons. Listen, we haul Charles out of bed, make the bed and to begin with, we position him on top of the bedspread.
We say: ‘That can’t be right, two people who together had so much speed. Let’s have a little party.’
(We, it is always Charles and I.)
Who’s that coming? It’s jolly well Edward, and he has brought his dog with him, it’s white with black freckles, and it jumps up on the bed and grabs a corner of the bedspread in its mouth and spins round twelve times while it whimpers as though it was painful work, ‘to make sure there are no snakes in the grass,’ Edward says, ‘the primitive mind, you know, when dogs were wolves,’ before eventually lying down. But then there is another knock at the door, and it has to get up and say hello, the entire ritual was in vain, my beloved Alma arrives, and she has Kristian with her, the dog spins round again, the bedspread is getting properly wrinkled, ‘easy now, lie down, there are no snakes.’ Alma and Edward have never met before, but they seem very familiar to one another, and poor Kristian gets jealous – until suddenly Edward is positive that he has seen him before too. Charles places the morphine on the table, who wants to try, Edward does. Edward is always in need of relief, first there were his parents, then Alwilda, his life is far too empty, he has to fill the great void that the dog alone has been unable to. I lug in an entire case of champagne from the kitchen, ‘the majority of eye injuries in the sixties were caused by champagne corks,’ Kristian claims and covers his face with his hands, he has never been much of a hero, in actual fact he would prefer to crawl under the table, and I tell them how during my time as a waiter I hit a man in the forehead. The corks fly, and the anticipation of the intoxication is like standing at a great height and looking across a kingdom, I seldom drink, but when I do, I drink far too quickly.
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