Ghosts Page 19

  I got my suitcase out of the van and set off in the direction of the harbour. It was black night by now and I had nothing to guide me but the starshine on the cobbles and an occasional, dim streetlamp shivering in the wind. I seemed to be going somewhere. My steps took their own way, down a sloping street and along by the sea wall and on to the pier. A few dim boats reared at anchor out on the jostling water, their mast-ropes tinkling. Have I mentioned My Search For God? Every lifer sooner or later sets out on that quest; I have seen the hardest inmates, fellows who would slit your throat before you could say knife, kneeling meek as toddlers beside their bunks before lights-out, their fingers clasped and eyes shut tight and lips moving in silent communion with the Lord. I am glad to say I managed to hold out for what I consider was a creditably long time. I had never really thought about religion and all that; this world had always been enough of a mystery for me without my needing to invent implausible hereafters (the adjective is redundant, I know). True, I had, and have still, off and on, a hazy sort of half belief in some general force, a supreme malignancy in operation behind the apparent chaos and contingency of the world. There are times, indeed, when I even entertain the notion of a personal deity, a God out of the old books, He that laughs, the deus ridens. I remember, when I was a young man and tenderly impressionable, reading in some book of an event in the history of the Xhosa people of the eastern Cape Province. Do you know about the Xhosa? They were a proud and sophisticated race, and great warriors, too, yet unaccountably, for nigh on a hundred years, they had been losing battle after battle against the armies of the white settlers. Again and again they had stormed across the veldt and hurled themselves with perfect confidence against the bullets and the bayonets of these grub-coloured pygmies in their scarlet tunics and were repulsed every time, suffering terrible losses. Then one day in a vision a young girl whose name was Nongqawuse was instructed by the voices of her ancestors to inform her people that they must slaughter all their cattle and give up all forms of agriculture, after which sacrifices the tribe’s ancestral dead would return to life, bringing with them great new herds and boundless supplies of corn, to form a ghostly, invincible army that would drive the white man into the sea. The tribal elders conferred and decided that the people must do as they were bidden; even the wise king Sandili (see, I have even remembered the names), who had been sceptical at first, in the end declared himself a believer in the New People. The livestock was slaughtered, the fields were laid waste, and the tribe settled down in confidence to await the day of days, which came and went, of course, without the appearance of a single phantom warrior. Nothing happened. The sun did not stand still in the sky, no great herds came thundering out of the dust, not a grain of corn appeared in the emptied bins. In that year of 1857 alone seventy thousand of the Xhosa died of starvation. Clearly I remember letting the book fall from my hand and staring before me with the mad light of the convert shining for a moment in my eyes and thinking yes, yes, there must be a God, if such things can happen! And I pictured Him, a rascally old boy with a tangled yellow beard and a drinker’s nose, reclining on a woolly cloud with his chin on his fist and chuckling to himself as that proud people walked out in solemn ritual into the fields and butchered their cattle and burned their crops. Probably by the time the famine came He had lost interest, had turned his attention somewhere else entirely, leaving the Xhosa to die alone, huddled and speechless, on the parched savannah. In time, of course, I lapsed from my faith in this prankster God, preferring to believe in the Great Nothing instead, which when you think about it is itself a kind of force. However, the moment came one impossible night in prison when I felt so far from everything, so lost in fear and anguish, that I found myself reaching out, like an abandoned baby reaching out its arms beseechingly from the cold cot, for someone or something to comfort me, to save me from these horrors. There was no one there, of course, or not for me, anyway. It was like coming to in the dark on the battlefield amid the cries and the flying cannon-smoke and feeling around for a limb that had been shot off. I had never known a blackness so vast and deep as that which my groping soul encountered that night. Almost as bad as the emptiness, though, was the fact of the need itself, that bleeding stump I could not bring myself to touch. And now as I stood on the pier, whirled about by the night wind, I felt pressing down on me the weight of another vast darkness and another unassuageable need, for what, I could not say precisely. I looked back at the town; how far off it seemed, how distant its little lights, as if I had already embarked and my voyage were under way. It came to me that I had reached the end of something, that this long day drawing to a close was the last of its kind I would know. What next, then? The voices spoke to me out of the wind, the dead voices. I stood above the black, heaving water and imagined how it would be, the blundering leap and then the plunge and the sudden, bulging silence as I sank. And in the morning they would find my suitcase standing on the pier, unique and incongruous, a comic prefigurement of my tombstone. Strange: I never seriously considered doing away with myself, even in prison, where regularly fellows were found strung up by ropes of knotted bedsheets from the waterpipes in their cells. But what did I have to lose now, that I had not lost already, except life itself, and what was that worth, to me? Cowardice, of course, plain funk, that was a stalwart that could be counted on to keep me dragging along, but there are times when even cowardice must and does give way to stronger, irresistible forces. Yet I knew I would not do it; not even for a moment did I think I might. Was it that in a way I was already dead, or was I waiting for some new access of life and hope? Life! Hope! And yet it must have been something like that that kept me going. Unfinished business, a debt not paid – yes, that too, of course, of course, we know all about that. But beyond even that there was something more, I did not know what. I felt that whatever it was – is! – it must be simple but so immense I cannot see it, as immense as air: that secret everyone is in on, except me. When I look back all seems inevitable, as if under everything there really were a secret structure, held immovably in place by an unknown and unknowable force. Every tiniest action I ever took was a grain of sand in the flow of things tapering towards that moment when I let go of myself, when with a great Tarraa! I flung open the door of the cage and let the beast come bounding out. Now I am condemned to sit here in my filthy straw and sift through the bones of it all over again. Eternal recurrence! That is what I realised that night, standing in the blackness at the end of the pier above the roiling, seductive sea: there was to be no end of it, for me; my term was just beginning. But what I was sentenced to this time was freedom. Freedom! What a thought! The very word gave me the shivers. Freedom, formless and ungraspable, yes, that was the true nature of my sentence. For ten terrible years I had yearned to be free, I had eaten, slept, drunk the thought of it, lay in my bunk at night, heart racing and eyes popping, panting like a decrepit masturbator towards that fantastic moment when the gates would swing open and I would be released, and now it had arrived and I was appalled at the prospect. I am free, I told myself, but what does it signify? This objectless liberty is a burden to me. Forget the past, then, give up all hope of retrieving my lost selves, just let it go, just let it all fall away? And then be something new, a sticky, staggering thing wi th myriad-faceted eyes and wet wings, an astonishment standing up in the world, straining drunkenly for flight. Was that it, that I must imagine myself into existence before tackling the harder task of conjuring another? I closed my eyes. My poor brain throbbed. I did not know what to do, whether to go on or go back or just stay here, somehow, forever. Presently I turned and retraced my steps to the town, ploddingly, confused as always, lost, and alone.

  Statues. I am thinking of statues. I have always found something uncanny about these sudden, frozen figures, the way they stand so still among moving leaves, or off at the end of an avenue, watching something that is not us, that is beyond us, some endless, transfixing spectacle only they can see. Time for them moves as slow as mountains. I am remembering, for instance, that
great photographer old Père Atget’s matutinal studies at Versailles and St Cloud of rainstained Venuses and laughing fauns, Vertumnus removing his winter mask, that rapt Diana with her bow starting out of the shrubbery into the sunlight beside the motionless pond; how vivid and rounded his lens makes them seem, how immanent with intent, these bleached, impetuous creatures poised as if to leap down from their plinths and stride away, trailing storms of dust behind them. Diderot developed a theory of ethics based on the idea of the statue: if we would be good, he said, we must become sculptors of the self. Virtue is not natural to us; we achieve it, if at all, through a kind of artistic striving, cutting and shaping the material of which we are made, the intransigent stone of selfhood, and erecting an idealised effigy of ourselves in our own minds and in the minds of those around us and living as best we can according to its sublime example. I like this notion. There is something grand and tragic in it, and something of essential gaiety, too. Diderot himself had great reverence for statues; he thought of them as living, somehow: strange, solitary beings, exemplary, aloof, closed on themselves and at the same time yearning in their mute and helpless way to step down into our world, to laugh or weep, know happiness and pain, to be mortal, like us. Such beautiful statues, he wrote in a letter to his mistress Sophie Volland, hidden in the remotest spots and distant from one another, statues which call to me, that I seek out or that I encounter, that arrest me and with which I have long conversations … I like to picture him, that cheerful philosophe, at St Cloud or Marly or the great park at Sceaux, talking to the cherubs on a carved vase or lecturing a stone Pygmalion on the hegemony of the senses.

  What statue of myself did I erect long ago, I wonder? Must have been a gargoyle.

  Here’s a story. Chap I knew in Spain once, in a previous life, painter, not very good, got a commission to do a portrait of a local bigwig in the village where we were both scraping a living at the time. My pal would go to the old boy’s house in the mornings and work on the canvas for an hour or so while it was still cool; he had not much Spanish and anyway in those parts they spoke an incomprehensible dialect, so conversation was at a minimum. For a long time the work did not go well. It was very hard to fix a likeness. The mayor, I think he was the mayor, an ugly old peasant with enormous hands and a simian brow, would sit very stiffly in his best blue suit in a white room staring fixedly before him with a hunted look, as if, said my friend, he were at the oncologist’s waiting to hear the worst. Some subjects, my friend explained, simply do not look like themselves; shyness, embarrassment, self-consciousness, something compels them to put on a mask and hide behind it; they will look like their mothers, their siblings, complete strangers, even, but not themselves. With such sitters the painter must coast along, biding his time, waiting for them to relax and forget themselves for long enough to be themselves. The mayor was such a one. He just sat there like a stuffed barbary ape, blank, featureless, folded up in himself. Until one morning my friend arrived and found him transformed; he was no more animated than at other times, but suddenly at last his face was open, the mask cast aside, his character – violent, rapacious, fearful, melancholy – legible in every wrinkle and mole and ill-shaved whisker. Well, the portrait was finished within the hour – and damned good it was, too, according to my friend – yet still the mayor sat there, gazing before him with a pensive and faintly puzzled look. You know of course what had happened, you saw it coming, didn’t you: the old man was dead, had died calmly of a stroke a few minutes before the painter arrived. You see, you see what I mean? To thine own self be true, they tell you; well, I allowed myself that luxury just once and look what happened. No, no, give me the mask any day, I’ll settle for inauthenticity and bad faith, those things that only corrode the self and leave the world at large unmolested.

  I am reading Diderot on actors and acting, too. He knew how much of life is a part that we play. He conceived of living as a form of necessary hypocrisy, each man acting out his part, posing as himself. It is true. What have I ever been but an actor, even if a bad one, too much involved in my role, not detached enough, not sufficiently cold. Yes, yes, it’s so. You think me cold? I am not. Harsh, perhaps, uncaring of the proprieties, too apt to make poor jokes, but not cold, no. Quite the opposite, in fact, hot and sweating in my doublet and hose, trying not to see the upturned faces beyond the footlights, the eyes greedy for disaster fixed on me as I stumble among my fellow players, stammering out my implausible lines and corpsing at all the big moments. This is why I have never learned to live properly among others. People find me strange. Well, I find myself strange. I am not convincing, somehow, even to myself. The man who wishes to move the crowd must be an actor who impersonates himself. Is that it, is that really it? Have I cracked it? And there I was all that time thinking it was others I must imagine into life. Well well. (To act is to be, to rehearse is to become: Felix dixit, or someone like him.) This has the feel of a great discovery. I’m sure it must be a delusion.

  Do you notice how the gull’s cry echoes through these pages, sounding its note of hunger and harsh beseeching? It is my emblem; my watermark. Next morning it was everywhere around me, a disembodied keening in the calm, white air. The wind had died and there was a kind of luminous, faint fog. I walked along the pier again, carrying my suitcase, but in daylight now, the scene a developed print of last night’s heartsick negative. The boat was a blunt vessel with a rusted chimney and a limp flag dangling in the cordage. When I arrived it was already loaded up with a cargo of tomatoes and potato crisps and bales of toilet paper and mysterious, complicated machine parts, all gleamingly, implausibly new. The skipper, a big-bellied man with a red face, stood in the wheelhouse and yawned. (If I were a visitor from another planet – but then, am I not a visitor from another planet? – I think that of all the earthlings’ quirks it is the act of pandiculation that would surprise and fascinate me most, that slow stretch and then the soundless ape-howl, in which they indulge themselves with such languorous relish.) There was a boy also, a nimble, bow-legged fellow with red hair and buck-teeth; he did all the work, scurrying about the deck and cursing violently to himself while Bulkington in the wheelhouse watched him with amusement and a kind of fond contempt, taking a quick nip now and then from a secret bottle stowed under a shelf behind the wheel. I seemed to be the only passenger. As soon as the cargo was loaded we got under way. I always feel a childish surge of excitement when the last mooring rope is cast off and the boat backs away shudderingly from the dock. We swerved into the middle of the harbour and swung about smartly and headed out past the lighthouse into the open sea. I stood in the bow and watched Coldharbour turn into a miniature of itself, complete with smoking chimneys and bristling masts and tiny figures moving on the quayside. I spotted Billy’s van, still parked outside the pub. Probably he had slept in it last night, huddled on the back seat with that wobbly spring sticking up and his knees in his chest, I, of course, had passed the hours of darkness in my accustomed fashion, hanging upside down under the tavern eaves wrapped in my leathern wings.

  The morning was extraordinarily still under a sky of pure pearl. The coast dwindled behind us; when I looked out from the prow we might have been a thousand leagues from land. The sea stretched away empty save for a white ship far off on the high horizon, unmoving, it seemed, impossibly tall and lit somehow from below, a glimmering, ghostly vessel. I like the sea; I am afraid of it, but all the same I like it, its strangeness, its indifferent thereness; in all that space I can forget for a while who and what I am. A pair of dolphins broke the surface and swam with us, criss-crossing our bows and gambolling in the wash, seeming emblematic of something, and now and then long-necked brown birds appeared out of nowhere, singly, flying low and straight at great speed above the water. The skipper kept to the wheelhouse and the boy sat on the deck with a transistor radio pressed to his ear, dead-eyed and rhythmically twitching. Soon the sky cleared and a delicate wind sprang up and the water turned to splintered sapphire. I lay and drowsed on a pile of tarpaulins, lapped
about by sea-sounds and cool zephyrs. I slept briefly and dreamed that I was back in prison and could not understand why the floor of my cell was swaying; then a warder wearing a seaman’s cap at a jaunty angle came and told me not to worry, that I would soon be let out, and laughed extravagantly, pointing a finger at me through the bars.

  I woke with a start and struggled groggily to my feet, rubbing my eyes. It was as though I had fallen asleep in one world and woken up in another. The air seemed brisker, the sky bluer. The boat fairly skimmed along, tensed in every timber, eager and light, as if at any moment it might take to the air in a great, groaning leap. I felt light-headed; when I looked out to the horizon it seemed it was not the boat but rather the sea itself that was swaying. Despite the early hour I brought out the gin bottle and took a steely swallow straight from the neck and walked to the bow-rail and stood and watched our wake unfurling behind us. Cloud-shadows, whale-blue and swift, skimmed the glittering surface of the sea. Have I said all this already? Suddenly there came to me the memory of a day when I was a boy and I cycled across country to the coast with my friend Horse. My friend; I had not many such, and those that I had did not last long, and nor did Horse. But that day our friendship was still at the tremulous, solemn stage that I sometimes think is all I have ever known of what they seem to mean when they chatter about love. We left our bikes hidden in a ditch and made our way through a little, dense dark wood and came out on the river estuary and found moored in the shallows among the reeds the punt that Horse’s father kept there for duck shooting. A keen hunter, Horse’s father, I remember him, a big, slow-moving, smooth-faced man, which Horse in his turn must be by now, I imagine. Horse undid the mooring rope and pushed us out of the reeds with a negligent deftness that filled me with envy and made me feel proud to be his pal. How lightly, with hardly a sound, the white punt glided over the water, seeming barely to touch the swiftly running surface. Horse stood above me in the bow and plied the scull, his eye fixed on a far horizon. We saw not a soul; we might have been alone in the world. For a mile or two we went along close to the river bank and then all at once sky and sea opened before us and we crossed a broad reach and came in sight of a long, low, khaki-coloured shore. I can see it, I can see it all, as clear as day, the white punt and that sunlit shoreline and the two of us there, Horse and me. It must have been a place where the river waters met the open sea, or perhaps it was something to do with the currents, or the tide was turning – I do not understand these things – but for a minute we were halted and held motionless on the unmoving water in the midst of a golden calm. The burnished surface of the sea was high and heavy and smooth as metal, and a small, repeated wave gambolled like an otter along the margin of the shore. The sun was hot. Nothing happened. We just stayed there for that minute, poised between sea and sky, suspended somehow as if in air, no, not air, but some other, unearthly element, and it seemed to me I had never known such happiness, and never would again, though happiness is not the word, not the word at all. That is where I would like to live, on some forgotten strip of sandy shore, with my back to the land, facing out into the limitless ocean. That would be freedom, watching in solitude the days pass, marking the seasons, observing the spring tides and the autumn auroras, weathering the summer sun and the storms of winter. Pure existence, pure existence and nothing else.