X
Scorpio and Pisces
In the north there is a woman
you see her
and you lose your kingdom
you see her once more
and the world is lost
— Nikos Kazantzakis
April. The first week of the monsoon from the southeast. By a mysterious process of osmosis, faces and bodies swell with humidity. It is as though the inhabitants of the boarding-house are being brought to the boil. Yesterday the postman with his darting, piggy eyes was like a pod about to split. Two letters: one from my mother … and when I saw the other my heart skipped a beat. I gave a rupee to the postman so he’d leave instead of fiddling round as usual with the few objects which have managed to follow me thus far.
My mother: blindness is often the child of affection, and she understands nothing of my letters. According to her, things here are not at all as I describe them. Her instincts tell her otherwise, and so do friends whom a luxury cruise brought fleetingly to the only four-star hotel in the capital. Although I am on the Island-of-smiles-and-moonstones, I always look on the black side to annoy her. ‘All those nasty people’ are figments of my imagination. When she thinks of me as a child … a clip in my hair (which I used to stuff furiously into my pocket before leaving the house), Czerny on the upright piano, funny remarks — stupid and unspontaneous — which had visitors in raptures. In short, a little poppet. From my present perspective: a sweet-talking, precocious little worm, an adroit liar, always dressed up in a way that made friends snigger. For those who can read between the lines, distance and travel haven’t done me any good. Then she lists my contented contemporaries, with their prospects and their marriages. It seems that the university is just waiting for my return. And her Parthian shot: my (subversive?) ‘tone’ so distresses my father he can’t bring himself to speak to me about it. My father? with his gentle eyes like an intelligent spaniel’s and his absurd Christian name; I think though that he’s secretly amused, and willingly backs the lame horse I’ll become.
Anyway he hasn’t thrown himself into the fray, simply adding at the foot of the page in his chiselled, italic handwriting the list of presents he received for his sixtieth birthday: a garden seat, a green overall with big pockets, secateurs, a book about bees, a pot of honey. Nothing distressed about that. And this comment: ‘Everything a bear in a fairytale might be given.’ A day in his life in a nutshell. In the course of that life, some humiliation which I know nothing about has reduced him to silence, to a great extent. When he thinks something is worth reporting, he is an incomparable story-teller. He plays out the story like a rope; his listeners are stunned, and almost resentful, to be hanging on every word of such a retiring man. Most of the time he prefers to express himself by a few winks on the border of silence. Those winks convey something; I am beginning to discover that the silence is crammed like a Christmas stocking with humour and patient wisdom. Despite some inevitable conflicts, I have never failed to realize that he is one of the most lovable people I have met.
… ‘All these nasty people’ (!?!?). Yesterday the capital’s biggest daily had a banner headline: Not one murder today! Cain’s day off, the flags were out for a red-letter day. They go in for throat-cutting in a big way on the Island-of-smiles. They weave spells and die of them. And on days of eclipse, Mother, the Demon Rahu devours the wandering moon. The other morning, in the little place where I go for my breakfast of bread and jam, I saw one docker — an ageless carcass tanned by poverty — mortally wounding another behind the slot-machine, where he’d lost three times in a row. The machete blow nearly dislocated his shoulder. Amok. The owner gently disarmed the culprit, who was completely prostrate by the time the police arrived. They entered it in their register in beautiful copperplate and violet ink, handcuffed him and carted him away. He would be hanged in six weeks and he knew it. We took the dying man to the hospital just next door, spent over an hour mopping up the blood which had flooded the tiled floor, then each returned to his business — which was mainly feeling too hot. A little life, a little mishap, a heated blow, violence. All those nasty people! My mother’s letters always put me back into shorts at the age of about seven. If I didn’t have better things to do, I would describe in detail — as in a slow-motion film — this tranquil madness, the noise of the abattoir, slicing to the bone, and our indifference afterwards, and the stale smell of the cleaning we all helped with, impatient as we were to get back to our everyday routine. Hopeless: I would never be able to storm that fortress of innocence. Papa, keep to your silence! don’t exceed your P.S. Stay King of the Bears or the well-read Chinese that you were in another life. It suits me, I like you like that. Once I’m home, I’ll certainly be winking back at you. ‘He who speaks doesn’t know, he who knows doesn’t speak.’ Agreed, Auguste?
… The other letter, those big, casual loops running across the envelope, I’ve been waiting six months for that. What is she doing with her life? In whose company? Who is in her smouldering bed of grass and leaves? Will we meet up next year in California, where Harper’s Magazine has offered me work? It’s a bulky letter, with a little hard object in it. I daren’t open it without first trying to swing the day in my favour. My travels, like my thrifty way of life, have made me something of a ritualist. I shaved, showered, swept my room like a monk cleaning out his cell before opening his missal. I even rubbed the Buddha on my shelf with palm oil until his small face, pitted by termites, glowed with pleasure. Went to market and returned with a twist of large-leafed black tea, a pound of little green lemons, a bottle of beer, a slice of swordfish covered in slate-blue skin as firm as leather, a packet of Peacock cigarettes. These purchases, laid out around my primus, suggest a man sure of his facts, firm of purpose. Worked all afternoon on the account of the battle of Kadesh (1286 B.C.). I like the Hittites, their rustic, mild civilization sleeping under three thousand years of the humus of Anatolian willow leaves. Here I find it a fresh counterweight; this is the moment to pin down images still clear in my mind. And I really hope to sell this article. The Hittites appeal to me because they disliked squabbles. Everything I know about them adds up to an unfailing commonsense. If they had to go to war then they won, thanks to brilliant charioteers and exceptionally shrewd tactics. Ramses II was wrong to pick a quarrel with them — despite his triumphal bas-reliefs, he was soundly beaten. I saw that engagement on the Orontis as though I had been there: the dust raised by the chariots, the helmets, the agonized cries, the Greek and Philistine contingents engaged against the Egyptians, the bejewelled camp-followers of both armies. My head was clear: the words were like pebbles in my pocket, weighed for David’s sling. ‘David displeased the Lord by taking into his bed Bathsheba, wife of Uriah the Hittite, who was very beautiful to look upon’ (The Book of Kings). And displeased Him further by putting her husband in the midst of a battle in order to get rid of him. The Old Testament is crawling with Hittites — selling a tomb here, buying a vineyard there — and a biblical quotation is worth its weight in gold with an American editor, especially a liberal one. Excellent.
I had covered three large pages when a black scorpion tumbled down from the ceiling beams into my bowl of tea. Dizzy? Pushed by a playful brother? I could tell by his size that he was a greenhorn from the last rain, in a great panic. I now know how to handle these little heraldic jewels: catch them between finger and thumb just under the sting. I put it on the floor, which it crossed in a flash, disappearing into a crack in the wall to wait for its mother to fetch it.
She is a Scorpio, actually, and ‘very beautiful to look upon’, so it must be my lucky day.
I tidied up my work and while my swordfish marinated in lemon, took my chair out to the balcony to watch the tinsel twilight show, daydreaming, chin in hand …
… Why do all the western languages say ‘to fall in love’? To climb would be more accurate: love ascends, like prayer. Ascendant and headlong. When an isopterous insect is mated, it immediately receives its pair of wings. I saw her again as she was
one night, beside me on the pier in my home town. Summer, silence, nearly dawn. I had known her for a week (of Kant, Herman Hesse, tennis). I thought she was magnificent. We walked at the same pace, without a word. I would easily recognize the place where I felt that the night had been suddenly torn asunder, where I was consumed by bliss. Suddenly life was sharp-edged, musical, intelligible. And above all, we kept silent. Out of the corner of my eye I tried to make her out. A half smile curling back from white teeth, a long stride, the crest of the wave. Not a word. But something had to be done. I gripped the tall, polished flagpole that stood on the jetty and effortlessly shinned up to the top. Up there, the last lights of the port shone reflected in the dark water, and she looked no bigger than a rose-bush. Believe me, this form of declaration had its own eloquence: when I came down, breathless, my hands full of splinters, I found her laughing madly, eyes shining with impatience, already half undressed. To climb …
The letter sent from Hamburg by surface post, two months ago, contained her wedding invitation — on which she had scribbled ‘so sorry ciao and bon voyage’ — and a golden fish (I am a Pisces) as long as a little fingernail. The card read Dr Phil M—, so the thesis on Renan was finished. Two years already. God how time passes! Was it Laclos who wrote ‘the worst of jealousy is that it survives love so long’? I was afraid that it would be quite the opposite this time. I was not jealous. I had been away far too long, too far away. Nothing I could have written to her would have prevented my becoming a shadow. I took out of my case the photo which had so often consoled me, and looked at that dazzling face one last time before burning it up with my lighter. Then I went down to make the landlord a present of the fish, explaining that it was a sign of the western zodiac carrying blessings, so that he wouldn’t take it for black magic. He put a red silk thread through the minute ring at the tail, and hung the amulet round the neck of his son, Puthah. Puthah is big for a three-year-old, has bulging eyes and under the indulgent eyes of the inhabitants pulls down his pants almost everywhere in the boarding-house. He has a little tika on his forehead and is fortunately too lazy to clamber up the five steps to my room.
‘So sorry’ — so was I! One reason the less for returning to Europe. From now on each to his own life, his own music; mine would be no more than a scraping for some time. Each to his own battle too; mine — which may never be won — would not be made any easier by this news. There were still splashes of wine across the darkened sky, the great profusion of colours was coming to an end. I felt like a routed general whose army, in a flash, had mysteriously melted away.
It was tempting to return to work, to fend off the images now coming back to me. If you knew what you’d be exposed to, you’d never dare to be really happy. When I took up the Old Testament again, it fell open at those three words ‘Jacob stayed alone’. And yet the dislocated thigh for having wrestled with the Angel! No shadow of an angel here, I’m better off than Jacob. Pull yourself together, Caliban, wake up you fool. All your journeys, your projects, this craze for coming and going, always changing horizons: who knows whether what you’re always looking for may be here, now, in this torrid room, within arm’s reach, lurking in the dark and only in the dark.
The same evening, a bit later
Little girl, little girl
if you think
that what goes on, what goes on
will last forever
the season of
season of love …
— Raymond Queneau
The uneasy rumbling that reached me over the shower of rain wasn’t in my head. It came from directly under my balcony. I don’t have claws yet but I’m beginning to grow antennae. I feel it in my bones: the termite community which so often makes its way across my walls and floor is in the process of thrusting up the cheap cement in the courtyard, endangering an age-old fortress, in order to launch out on its nuptial flight. Here, as everywhere, the transports of love are not without danger. Night has now fallen, the rain has stopped, the ground has softened, the operation can be risked. The ants, forewarned, feverishly prepare to descend into the opening cracks. They are not alone; extending well beyond the boarding-house is a ring of snapping jaws, snouts, stings, mandibles, vibrating with greed. That pretty world of killers I’m getting to know — centipedes, nightjars, spiders, lizards, grass snakes — is literally on edge. Dark-lantern in hand, I went down to look at the approaching massacre. Through the cracks of fractured concrete the flying termites rose up in serried ranks for their nuptials, wings sticking to their bodies, their corselets newly shined like black pearls in the bazaar. These virgins and maidens have been cherished for years in darkness, in an absolute security such as our precarious existence cannot provide, unaware of the whole society of crooks, swine and bandits gathered to welcome them to their first ball. They shook themselves out as they rose, creating a sooty, humming cloud that misted over the stars: a brief enchantment. After a few drunken moments they fluttered down in a light shower, shedding their wings, looking for a cranny in which to disappear with their partners. For those falling back into the courtyard, there was no escaping the patrols of red ants in control of the territory. Bean-sized armoured soldiers, flanked by frenzied foot soldiers seven or eight millimetres long, scuttled off with the defenceless fiancés, chirring and brandishing a bundle of dead or injured victims. Other juggernauts, guided by their lieutenants, attempted to invade the fortress defended by the termite soldiers standing shoulder to shoulder. I have often seen these strange conscripts — dreamed up eons ago by superior termites — doing simple police work on my walls (escorting a column of workers, threatening a rash intruder) with their incredibly awkward gait: soft belly, armoured front and that enormous bulbous head, which lets fall on the enemy one drop of corrosive, sticky liquid. In profile they are minuscule warriors in their tournament gear, visor lowered, nerves of steel. A few centimetres from the crack, the assailants received salvo upon salvo and soon fell by the wayside, madly waving their legs until their joints seized up completely. The defenders, torn to bits or dragged away, were quickly replaced on the ramparts. Here and there a daredevil would leave his trench and jump into the fray in order to aim better, before being hacked to pieces. There were no runaways or cowards on either side, only the dead, and survivors so possessed by battle-fever that they forgot the light from my lamp or to bite my gigantic bare feet. If we put as much heart into our affairs, we would succeed more often. Hisses, thuds, war-cries, shouts of agony and frustration, the clash of carapaces. The snip of wire-cutters could be heard two metres away. The sound rising up from this carnage was like the crackling of a vine-shoot bonfire. Before dawn the ants began their retreat, and the worker-termites to repair the breaches, with soldiers to guard them. They will be walled out, to end their blind mercenaries’ lives at the hands of the sun and other enemies. At this price the termite colony had won its wager. Such prowlers and invaders as had managed to get in were already slain, dismembered, preserved against the days of dearth. In the hardest cell of concrete, where she lives a prisoner, the queen had heard the news. One of her ‘Switzers’ told her, antenna to antenna, comically wagging his great head: ‘Marlborough has come back.’ Time for the subterranean Te Deums, for the counting of dreadful losses now security was re-established. Time to replace precisely the number of useful dead, soldiers, workers, mated termites, by genetic manoeuvres it seems we still don’t understand — and just as well, perhaps. In any case, no one in these clay catacombs chooses his fate. Have I really chosen mine? Is it really of my own accord that I’ve lingered here for hours, crouched by the ladder, watching the massacre and looking for some sign?
The first ray of sun woke me, warming one cheek. I had fallen asleep on the ground, beside the lantern still burning and hissing. I could see the courtyard covered in a dust of silvered wings, empty carapaces, severed heads and limbs, shattered armour. A few large ants, glued together, were stirring feebly. Nosy cockroaches were up and about, already at work in the cemetery. I wondered whether this disas
trous day would be given a name in the chronicles of my mysterious, microscopic companions. Would it have one in mine?
XI
A Pinch of Curiosity …
For we have reached the oldest land
herein the Powers of Darkness range.
— Rudyard Kipling
One day when nothing was going right, and because I’m fascinated by all the stories I hear, I went down to M—. It is a large village at the far south of my Island; a coach whose slashed velvet seats go back to Edward VII’s childhood will take you there for two rupees. I went on foot, relying on the exercise to help me get a grip on myself. The route provides a magnificent display of superfluous beauty. The road is nibbled on one side by the surf, on the other by a profusion of hyacinths, and runs straight under the tall coconut palms. It is a long, abandoned riding track, almost deserted, which could well lead to some deposed giant’s den. On gusty days you can see a hail of nuts crashing to the ground from twenty yards above smashing the palm canopies over handcarts, knocking down the passer-by who hasn’t hitched up his sarong and taken to his heels. Calm restored, the path is strewn with open shells, which a tribe of voracious crabs scrambles for, madly zig-zagging across the road or, balancing on their claws, makes as though to stop your passing. Well before reaching the village you see the gigantic tree which shelters nearly all of it. It is a lordly banyan, head and shoulders above the tallest coconut-palm. Above it revolves a black column, lazily twining and untwining with a low murmur. From a distance I took it for a flight of crows. In fact it is a troupe of vampire bats, leaving the tree where they have slept all day hanging upside down, their triangular ears pointing groundwards. By the time I arrived there were only a few of these dark fruits in the lower branches, delicately unfolding their wings to reveal the silky stomachs of well-fucked whores, taking to the air and spiralling upwards to join in the twilight sabbath. The village lay in filtered light under that black parasol. Two short streets, a square giving on to the shore where the fishing boats were already beached for the night, and several stalls just vacated, whose brass scales inexplicably jingled in the still air. Between the stalls, squatting around a fly-blown butcher’s block, were half a dozen men smoking in silence. I greeted them as I passed, received no look or word in response, and went to lie on the beach, chin in hands, looking at the square. Saw another of those mendicant bonzes renowned for their insolence and impudence, who approached the group ringing his little bell, took one look and went on his way — like a bad dog giving wide berth to even worse curs. I was tired with walking and dropped off for a moment. When I woke up the sea had turned to pewter; the bats were breaking out of their circle and scattering to the four corners of space. Dusk overflowed in its sumptuous, melancholy beauty. The six men sluggishly poked at the fire they had lit, whose flames made the whites of their eyes gleam in their dark faces. I heard their muffled voices and decided it would be best not to hang about. As I rose to my feet I felt a great paw shove me in the back, took two staggering steps and sprawled on the beach. I turned over, teeth gritty with sand. Of course there was no one in sight, only a big, blue-speckled skate still struggling in the nets and dying slowly, stinking to high heaven. One of the most common tricks of the island magicians is to make an interloper fall down, even from a distance, and especially on market days, when the victim collapses under the weight of his shopping. All the same, it was a warning shot. They have more than one way of letting you know you’re not welcome here. This was one; I had no desire to put more radical methods to the test. Night had fallen, I walked along the beach and set out again for Galle, twitching rather too often at the sound of my own footsteps.
The Scorpion-Fish Page 5