A second newspaper story that drew his attention was even more fascinating, and certainly more meaningful in the general scheme of things. A psychic had been arrested in the capital and accused of fraud and embezzlement for having convinced several of her clients to become, in essence, her servants. They had cleaned her house and accomplished many other services, many of them in her bed. She was said to have taken over the minds of at least seven people, introducing fake memories, creating unspeakable guilt and gutting any confidence they had left in themselves, leading them to hand over complete control of their actions. These poor souls had enslaved themselves to this psychic’s will, and emptying their bank accounts was child’s play after that.
This story gripped Victor. As far as he could establish, these people had not been mentally handicapped; weak-minded, certainly (but weren’t we all, he thought, in one way or another?), and looking for answers to some of the numerous questions and torments that even the simplest of lives tends to throw in our path. And after all, a medium or a psychoanalyst—just a question of taste, as far as he was concerned. At least mediums spoke and made predictions about your future. The number of people he met who consulted shrinks was impressive (curiously enough only women; perhaps the men were ashamed and hid it). And they all said precisely the same thing, even after years of assiduous visits: “I have not advanced an inch in the understanding or resolution of my problems, but it does me good anyhow to talk. You can’t do this alone and almost never with anybody you know.” Victor could rarely leave it there. Why did they need a largely silent body to talk to or at? For a nice price. Why not just have these discussions with yourself? “It’s impossible, you don’t understand.” They all said the same. And it was true. He didn’t understand. He would never understand why people placed limitations on the conversations they had with themselves. After all, you didn’t go to a shrink for a laugh, they sat and stared at you—what more did they bring than a heart to heart with yourself? Incomprehensible, he thought. The suspicion of narcissism was never far from his mind.
Victor gathered up his newspapers and left the café. He was anxious to get back to Yorick, to move on with his education and with the development of his didactic program. He had lain awake for a long time the previous night trying to decide what next to teach his friend once he had mastered God’s demise. It was important to keep a phrase or two ahead, to ensure continuity. He had muttered this and that dictum and idea to himself. When it came to it, it was not so easy as that to identify and conclude on a truth on which you could not ever go back. And this reflection in itself had finally provided the answer! “All is provisional”! Victor had liked that, liked that a lot, and had said it over and over again to himself until he had disappeared into sleep. As a reasonably astute observer of himself, he knew that many night thoughts which appeared absolutely conclusive and profound when they came to him had a tendency to shrivel up and die in sleep and to look poor, ragged and fairly useless in the morning. But on waking today, he had tested these words and not found them wanting. Incontestable, even quite beautiful, he said to himself. Perhaps absolutely bloody obvious—but he had eliminated that totally and definitively as a possible objection, after thinking a lot about Helen’s snide remarks on the death of God.
Was there anything to say about the material world, was there anything here to teach Yorick, Victor asked himself as he walked home? He looked at the dirty white terraced houses on either side of the road with a certain amount of pain at their vacuity (or my own? he wondered, as he had done all his life) and a strong suspicion that absolutely nothing lay beyond their fragile facades. My God, he thought, how much time I have already wasted on this question, just to begin all over again. But it was necessary. Either he would do this whole business properly, or he might as well abandon the job right now and be content to live with a silent bird.
After his wordless abandonment of the houses, he raised his head to see if the sky offered any lessons. It did not, none that he could comprehend at least. Just a thick mass of meaningless grey clouds. If I want to be honest, said Victor to himself, it wouldn’t be much different if I were sitting, as I have done, on a restaurant terrace in Santorini, watching the setting sun transform the spectacular seascape into a myriad of colors and changing forms. He had, happily, already learned to hide the vice of his blindness when he had embarked on a Greek island cruise with … what was her name? Brigitte? No, it was Clara, who was so enthralled and moved by the view that she had gushed enough for two and hadn’t noticed that he had no opinion and had just sat there holding her hand and smiling and nodding his assent to her superlatives. He had desired this woman very much and had understood just in time that any attempt to try and explain his indifference to the physical world would have led to impossible discussions and misunderstandings and misery for both of them. Having narrowly escaped planting the seed of doubt in her mind, he had played out his designated rôle as a good and interested tourist with some talent and had only broken with her some time after they had finally reached home.
He wouldn’t, couldn’t yet give up this debate with himself—it intrigued and still anguished him—about the existence or signification of the external world and what might be extracted from it that made any sense at all, but as he made his way through his Potemkin neighborhood, he forced his mind away from it and took refuge again in the much more real world of his thoughts.
Bollocks and Ballocks
“You’ll never guess what your fiendish little bird just said to me!”
It was two days after their dinner, and Helen had come around with the sardonic request that she should be “formally introduced” to Yorick. He had left her alone with the bird, giving her instructions like a solicitous nurse with a fragile patient, that she only had five minutes with him, no more. It was important that Yorick shouldn’t confuse voices in these early days or, God forbid, learn anything from her.
“He couldn’t have said anything,” replied Victor, “he can’t talk yet.”
“That’s what you think. I was just commiserating with him on having been sentenced to live with you when he said, quite distinctly, ‘bollocks’!”
“What?” asked Victor with a pained look. “No, you must be mistaken. He hasn’t made any sounds other than squeaks and squawks since he’s been here, and they assured me in the shop that he didn’t yet have a word to his name.”
Helen took him by the hand and led him back to the dining room. They sat down at either side of the table facing the cage. Yorick looked at one, then the other, but remained mute. Victor and Helen looked at the bird and then at each other. After a few moments of silence, Helen repeated her taunt: “Little Yorick, poor bird! Condemned to share your life with Victor!”
“Bollocks!” And after a pause, again, “Bollocks!” came a strangely hollow but clear voice from the cage. There was no mistaking it.
“Jesus!” exclaimed Victor. “It’s true.” He had heard the word quite recently, and it had amused him then as one of his favorite childhood profanities, perhaps second only to ‘wanker’. When was that? I know, I know … “Yes! The pet shop assistants,” he said to Helen. “That’s what they said to each other every two sentences when they came round with Yorick and the cage.”
The malicious little swine, he thought. He was sure that Yorick hadn’t just picked this up from shoptalk. They had certainly repeated it to his face a sufficient number of times for him to take it as his own.
“Dear me,” said Victor. “That’s awful. What do I do now? Take him back?”
“Actually, I think there’s a certain charm to it,” said Helen slyly. “Sounds positively Shakespearean. Maybe even medieval.”
Victor knew what she was thinking and knew that she knew what he would do. “OK,” laughed Victor, “I shall rise to the bait.” He went to the bookshelves which lined one side of the dining room and extracted a heavy volume from the dictionary section. He flicked quickly through the pages, “‘Bollocks,’” he said out loud, “‘see ballocks.’�
� “Anglo Saxon! ‘A long and distinguished history’, which Oxford traces back to the 1382 Wycliffe bible!”
This pleased Victor very much. He had inherited the etymology bug from his father, a schoolteacher, who would leap up suddenly from the dinner table when any word with a potentially interesting origin crossed the lips of any member of the family, or even guests, and rush to his library to track it down. Returning, so engrossed did he sometimes become, ten to fifteen minutes later, his food cold, he rambled on about Old Norse or Sanskrit, Low German or Old Persian, to the kindly smiles of his wife, Victor’s mother, who forgave him for the food, since “dad doesn’t have many passions, you know,” as she would explain with affection to her four children.
“There’s more,” said Victor. Seeing the suspicion of a yawn taking shape in Helen’s jowls, he added, preventively, “Just one more fact,” and then, with evident pleasure: “Haha! From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, ‘bollocks’ or ‘ballocks’ was used as a slang term for clergymen and—wait, this is the best part—its modern meaning of nonsense probably emerged because they were—still are, of course—notorious for talking absolute crap—that’s my word—during their sermons!” Victor slammed the book shut, triumphantly, reconciled forever with Yorick’s adoption of the swearword.
All this talk of bollocks … Victor smiled to himself. It’s true I have a bit of an itch this morning. Unlike men, who would obligingly drop their underpants for anyone, anywhere, anytime, he had learned that the majority of women had to be approached on the matter with a degree of delicacy, particularly in the early days of a relationship. In time this would all pass into social history, he supposed, but an awful lot of women, particularly in his age group, still possessed a set of neurons which told them that they shouldn’t appear ‘easy’ or too ‘willing’ in the matter. If he believed the women’s magazines, which he liked to read in doctors waiting rooms, such reflexes and principles were fast becoming redundant and new generations of lustful young ladies were emerging who would lunge randily at anything wearing trousers, without invitation or sentiment. He hadn’t noticed it personally, but if it was true, he couldn’t see what could possibly prevent the country from becoming a giant fuckodrome. If it wasn’t one already, unbeknown to him.
Once the cultural question had been overcome, once they had been conquered on the level of principle and lured into your bed, women then split into so many categories of behavior that it made Victor’s head spin. Some you barely had to look at or touch, and they began urging, panting, moaning, clutching, scratching. For only the third time in his life, he had recently met another biter; she was the most excessive of them all, making him yell in pain and protest and leaving deep teeth marks in his arms and his chest, which turned from red to blue to yellow over the course of the following week. He had never gone back to her, out of pure and simple fear. Others, too many of them, needed half an hour or more of careful preparatory work before they even got into the mood of the thing. He had given up looking for equality of attention and effort with these women and had approached the task selflessly, in an artistic spirit. He had once explained it honestly to Clara, who was one of the rare ones to feel some guilt at her lack of efforts in his direction and had apologized about her “surrender” to his kisses and caresses: “Someone has to take charge,” he said gallantly and truly. “Making love is like creating a play or a film—you need a script and a director to command the scenes.”
It had gone well so far with Helen, he thought. Happily, she was small, which was always a relief, since the ground to cover when caressing the bodies of tall and slowly aroused women was sometimes just too much for one man’s arms to manage without inviting paralysis and, in addition, implied clumsy shifts in position to take in feet, thighs, breasts and neck in single, smooth movements. Helen had also been helpful; it could be awkward, but it was preferable to get some of the finer distinctions of arousal out of the way at the start, and she had been kind and effective. Victor had mastered the basic techniques long ago but, again unlike men, women’s bodies had come out of a multitude of moulds, and trial and error were unavoidable. As he pulled, pressed and squeezed one of Helen’s nipples on their first occasion in bed, without eliciting any response and without even having the time to give the other nipple its fair share of attention, she had easily and quickly whispered to him: “No, my nipples aren’t sensitive; please caress the whole breast, I love that.” Breasts! Divine gifts of nature! Victor had read the most erotic possible description of breasts in a Jean-Paul Sartre novel, when one of the characters had remarked: “She has tits like hunting horns.” Unfortunately, this woman he had never found, but he did not despair of encountering her too one day. This was in itself reason enough to face the future with hope and optimism.
Before or after lunch? When might Helen be more likely to allow herself to be seduced? She didn’t seem in any hurry to go anywhere, so he decided to risk lunch first. A couple of glasses of wine could work miracles, after all. He didn’t wish Yorick to be exposed at length yet to two voices at the same time, so they ate in the kitchen. Victor deliberately chose to avoid any subject of conversation which might lead to friction and spoil his chances of “having his way” with her, an expression reflecting another age which made him smile.
“What a nice wine,” said Helen as she sipped her second glass, which Victor had poured barely had she downed the last drop of her first. “Go easy, though, it’s quite heady. You know already how affectionate alcohol makes me, you naughty man.”
Victor smiled sweetly but avoided any bawdy retort, lest she think him hasty and, heaven forbid, “inelegant”—her most devastating damnation of anything or anybody.
“Yes, yes, I’m quite the same, you know. Two or three glasses of Bordeaux, and I fall in love with the whole of humanity. I sit on a café terrace and cast my blessings—silently, of course—on passersby, twice or three times in the case of those who look the most evil and stupid and clearly have the most sins for me to forgive. Sometimes, I actually begin to believe I’m Jesus Christ.”
“You, the great atheist?” she laughed.
“Why not?” he asked gently. “Profound goodness and benevolence and tolerance have always fascinated and attracted me. The danger is to equate them with stupidity and dullness, with which they are also commonly related, it’s true. But an intelligent, strong and slightly wicked man or woman, who is also virtuous and charitable and kind, isn’t that an ideal?”
Victor was, of course, speaking about himself, or at least his aspirations. I’m far too inclined to do that, he thought, in however roundabout and disguised a manner. I must watch my tongue, he told himself repeatedly; it was aesthetically unattractive and quite possibly boring. In his own defense, he also thought that after an intimate, life-long relationship with his navel, he was the only subject that he could really talk about with any authority. Perhaps I should save it for Yorick? He wouldn’t care one way or the other. But Helen continued to look at him kindly and didn’t seem to mind his egocentric chitchat. He hadn’t screwed up his chances, clearly.
Victor cleared the kitchen table as Helen continued to sip her wine. On his way back from the sink, he kissed her softly from behind, on the neck; she purred, he kissed her again, this time gliding his lips down the nape from below her ear almost to her shoulder … “Meow, meow,” she responded. “Come kitty, come,” said Victor, taking her by the hand and leading her to the bedroom.
Helen acquiesced as he slowly took off her clothes and rapidly divested himself of his own. As usual, he took the initiative and covered her body with kisses and caresses. She pouted and purred and made other little sounds which had no names in any language known to man. She was soon somewhere else entirely, the unknown place women go when they lose themselves in love-making, while he remained, as men always did, conscious and lucid and nowhere more exotic than the bedroom of his home. Indeed, he soon found himself thinking about other things; this was practically unavoidable. Unpaid bills; Yorick’s educationa
l program; Saturday’s rugby international.
While Victor remained silent, Helen on her own planet muttered encouragements to him: “Yes, yes, give me your big prick. Fuck me, fuck me,” and much of the same. She must have read somewhere that it excites men to hear obscenities, he thought. It’s most decidedly not my case, but I can’t really protest, can I? He wished though that he had the nerve to tell her to caress his balls while he moved inside her, changing rhythm and movements from time to time. But he didn’t want to break the spell.
Thankfully, Helen came easily and very loudly, which filled Victor with masculine pride and an apish sense of his own virility, however crass he found this reaction. It was far from always the case, as he knew to his chagrin from a long and well-filled sex life, but when he had satisfied a woman like this he had trouble restraining himself from making monkey noises and beating his chest. He in turn came in Helen, almost as an afterthought.
As they lay side by side, lightly panting, she said with a smile: “You penetrate me like a solemn god entering his temple.” He liked that; it was true.
A Toast to the Chinese Communist Party
Homo Conscius Page 4