A Dream of Horses & Other Stories (10 page)

On her though, the effect is far serious. Her lips suddenly tighten and a stern look fills her face. A lone nerve is twitching on her forehead. She is about to weep. Now she is walking towards me. Uncontrollable tears roll down her cheeks. In a moment, she is in my arms, kissing and speaking at once. She is telling me it’s been seven years.

So suddenly has all of it happened that I don’t understand at first. Then a face grows over this one and I feel a stab in my heart. I pronounce the name slowly, with much difficulty.

She doesn’t respond, but her hold tightens and her lips press against mine ever more intensely. I feel blood drain from my legs. At last I have seen dream and life coincide. I am closer to the end than I ever was. I am surer of it.

The weakness passes. We walk back to the steps and sit beside one another. For a seemingly long time none speaks. The mist pleasantly lingers around us. Pigeons beat their wings urgently, making a dry perfunctory sound. Her smell has evoked in me that one image, drawn in precise detail like a Flemish painting. From a valley far away rise up the bell-chimes of a village temple. The distant rhythmic chimes bring to mind another forlorn sound that has traversed the treacherous distance of memory.

Something has caught my attention. Her navel is decorated by the arabesque of a strange tattoo – a kite-like formation of intertwined tails of numerous faceless serpents that from one end advances dangerously towards forbidden regions. Also, a fever is growing in her.

She begins to speak, but I say there will be time later. While we walk back to the cottage, her head is on my shoulder and our arms thread through each other. The wind rises and falls in the pines and only intermittently a word or a whole phrase reaches me. Stranded…Grey wastes…Pharaohs…A few words in Arabic…A name…Port of Alexandria…But I am far away from all of it, even from her. I have just seen the spot where I belong – have always belonged.

She refuses to eat, but she has taken a few sips from the cup I gave her. She says she wishes to lie down with me. Night is already entering the earth.

We are in the dark. She has fallen into a light sleep while I have been stroking her shoulders. Her breathing is heavy and comes in gasps. The warm air falls on my neck in lumps. But I am far away, on the sands that I will never see or touch. And later near the sea, near the vessel. She stands on the deck, and the moist cheerful air slips into her heart and drums its sundry rhythms on it. With one hand resting on the rails and the other at her hip how beautiful she looks.

Then she speaks slowly as if from inside a deep cave: Suppose I die?

Then I’ll die too, I answer.

Why so?

Because one must share the fate of his loved one.

She has turned her back to me and I know she is looking out of the window. Her lean hips warm my groin. Past the branches of the deodar a yellow moon pours its shine into our hearts, a moon so low that the hills seem to cup it, overwhelmed all about by a thin darkness. Like a wolf or an owl the moon has bewitched me. An hour before dawn it turns golden and a procession of white clouds quietly passes over it.

At first glow I go over to my desk and pull out the pile of pages from the drawer. The house has grown hauntingly silent. Before I know the sun is high up in the sky and the swallow has alighted on the window sill to keep me company. Twice a light mist flows into the room. From time to time, the deodar becomes invisible. The world turns mute.

Light had left the hills when I went out. Outside the moon coloured the cottages a crimson white. The clubhouse with its blue dome looked like the retreat of a pasha. Soon I was descending into the valley. I crossed the bazaar where most shops had closed down for the day, while a few were tending to last-minute customers.

Before long I was walking (or drifting?) on a narrow mountain road that at some distance joined the main highway. It was pleasantly deserted. I must have walked a mile when my sight fell on a white chrysanthemum that lay at the edge of the road over a bed of wild mountain grass. It appeared unusually big and I was tempted to touch it. Now the moon was troubling me, glowing like the sun. I raised the chrysanthemum like a parasol and a cool shadow fell on my face.

All of a sudden, a slanting drizzle burst from the sky. I was drenched in no time, but the flower was completely dry. The rain had a curious effect on me – it roused forgotten thoughts and distant and enchanting sounds. In my mind’s eye I saw Asya
gazing pensively afar, while the clear water of the lake, the sky, and the mustard fields sang for her. This vision lasted only a moment. After this, I heard a motley collection of sounds, a few gaining prominence, one after the other, before falling back into silence. First came the cries of a baby from the cold desert of Mongolia. This was followed by a deafening laughter of a pod of whales from deep in the Pacific. Then rose up the bell chimes of a temple in the south. And finally I thought I detected the crisp, dry sound of two atoms colliding on a star seven worlds away. Yet all I heard were the melancholy notes of a lute.

The rain fell leisurely, lightly. In a few moments (for a few moments) I had jumped past time and space. Everything in the world, I whispered to the black vault, exists to end up not in a book like the Poet had believed but in man’s heart.

But in my flight neither did I notice that I was walking in the middle of the road nor did I hear the rattling sound of the old tractor that had come dangerously close, its faint beam barely illuminating the road ahead. It hit me from behind with great force instantly breaking my spine. Blood filled my mouth, and I vomited it eagerly. The flower still in my hand, I nearly flew under the impact tracing a red arc on the ground, fell on the wet grass, and rapidly rolled down into the valley. My fall was interrupted by a pine with a split trunk where rest at last descended on the tired, broken body. Then a heavy darkness fell over me.

Having reached the end of the page, she quickly turns it over to read further. But there is nothing. A blank page glares at her. She halts for a moment, and then returns to the last page and reads it again, slowly, almost meditatively. When she looks away, dawn is breaking. Her eyes are moist with fatigue. She is tempted to close them. From the music player in a corner, rise up the strains of
Vivaldi’s
Cello Concerto in C Minor
drowning the stillness settling over her heart.

Two Travellers

He who is about to sing the fourth song is either a man or a stone or a tree
.
Lautréamont

That is why he came here. For the silence that opens the door, that destroys this crumbling rampart hopelessly thrusting its lot in space – letting, for once, the watcher watch himself. Cold, of which he is unaware, is already closing him into the night. Mist lingers over the woods, and a half-burnt moon draws out streaks of light from the white ground. His sight is in the throes of leave-taking and he cannot be certain of the lone star that shines aeons away past the low drifting clouds, suddenly opening up to him the vastness of the universe. O you fiery, flaming orb! O you last frozen tear of the retreating deity! But never before has he felt his breath move with the earth. At last there is the rhythm he has sought in vain all along, in paint, in music, in words. At last he breathes for the wolf that prowls in the trees, for the lark that will sing on the morrow.

Hands which are nearly claws, stiffening and curling in, make him more and more into the fierce bird he loves, whose movements he has watched countless times for long spells, spellbound –
those long pernings, the quivering poise, the wings lifted for
the plummet drop, the wild reascent, fascinated by such extremes of need, of pride, of patience, of solitude –
his twin, if he can believe the look of himself in the mirror or in the eyes of those he meets in the street. Due to the contracture in the tendons of his fingers, he holds the pen with difficulty. Not that much is left in him to work with. In truth, he only writes a little for distraction, for in the present state the piano is beyond him. And yet he can hear the quiverings of a song, what he sees coming into being each day on the page. A slow piece, with ever-widening silences, as in Beethoven’s Seventh, so that there is nothing but a bridge of sounds suspended from dizzy heights, linking one upon another deep oceans of calm. Or is it merely the sap behind language, behind the words he has drilled big holes into, which has begun to flow? Nothing to express, but a need to express.

More than ever, he now understands Bram’s gouache, no longer in the cottage, but securely fastened on a wall in his mind, so long and hard has he stared at it: the wave rising from none knows where into the heart, into the mind, leaving the hand which moves the brush, flooding all the filthy logic, now mingling, now divulging, here swishing through vast empty spaces like a comet, there abstracted from time and serene like a peak.

For most part of the day he lies in his cot curled in the usual way, holding his knees tight to the chest, entering the darkness, so he thinks, from whence he came, and drawing on the inside of his eyelids a mosaic of faces and images. Towards the evening he takes long walks in open cold, and upon returning to the cottage, prepares a meal, rice and a vegetable stew mostly, and smokes and drinks himself into oblivion. White Beaujolais at dinner, then later his favourite whiskey and slim black cigars. He has no use for his old car, which he will soon be giving away to the farmer’s son who helped him paint the two rooms last winter. At this time of the year, the country roads are broken and slippery, and his vision is too poor to permit the adventure of fast driving.

Days go by without meeting or speaking to anyone. Earlier he would not have been able to stand this quiet, now he lusts for it. Aside from checking up on his wife each day, he stays clear of the phone. It has beeped just once in the whole week; his publisher, the one other person who knows he is in Ussy, called to tell him that they were yet again planning to put up the accursed play in Berlin. Will he travel to Germany to direct it? He is sick up to his throat with the nonsense of those tramps to pass time and the debris it kicks up in papers with each rerun at a theatre. All this when he wrote it simply to travel into a memory of a painting seen in Germany before the war. That and the vaudevilles of his youth. And the waiting, yes, the waiting in unending queues to collect his ration from German soldiers. No, he replies, he is too old and too bored with it. What do they expect from him at seventy-eight? Last man left in the banquet.

Night falls quickly. For this he can only be glad. Mercifully, time slumbers in the depths, and he finds himself rocking back and forth in the cradle of his past: Look, look there, at the fir tree of his childhood which turned green a week before others in the yard. How he climbed up to its top and jumped without a thought, the low branches breaking his fall, and yet failing to think of the fall itself or his cracked skull against the cold hard earth. Same for the dive into the sea from Forty-Foot at Sandycove. Such perverse yearning for vertigo, such brave curiosity of the precipice.

He never did think far into the future; only the past ever held his interest. And maybe this is why he never thought too hard about leaving the easy certainty of a teaching post and running away to Germany, to the art galleries that would put air back in his lungs. Already it had become impossible for him to teach Ronsard and Racine to rich and thick students, hungry only for the crumbs he threw at them, nudging past one another to a bright academic career. How could he explain this to the professor who had arranged, in the first place, his move to Paris
as a lector? And his father? He trembles at the very thought of that distant evening, of his father’s pride on entering the private lawns of Trinity, which he had laid open with a key allowed only to the elect. The deepening hollow in his mother’s eyes he has somewhat forgotten, but the bays and mountains of his youth are etched clear on his heart. And what of the time when the covert operation he worked in during the war was compromised by that infamous double-crosser who on the very night of betrayal had taken along his concubine to squander his reward in the brothels of Pigalle, the brown, nubile whores joining her and working him up in an orgy, unaware of his beautiful priest crucifix lying rolled up in a cheap underwear? Did he not once think of the spectacular horrors awaiting him on the other side of the night as he made his escape from Paris by the very skin of his teeth (the shivers came later, and so, inevitably, did the tears!), while the Führer’s grey-uniformed phantoms got ready to make the arrest?

It seems to him that he has led all his life in a soft fog of memories. Whatever he has read and written, whatever he has heard and played, all that he has seen and done. Sounds and images come in flashes, while washing, cooking, walking, working. Everything he tastes, sees, touches, smells bursts into impressions. The solitary yelp of a dog reaching him from across the Marne is already that of many dogs barking in the stone quarries up in the hills in a night of his childhood. And now there is the figure of a black swan on an Australian stamp in his brother’s collection. But before long the swan is vanishing in the sound of a cowbell tinkling in the pastures under the peak of Monte Generoso, which is reflected in the waters of Lake Lugano. And now there is the little boy urinating against the wall in the painting by Salomon van Ruysdael, and now the smell of his own piss rising from the hedge under a bottom-heavy moon over the village of Laxenburg near Vienna, and now the neat row of prostrate figures on a roof, their bottoms bronzing in the sun, and now the little patch of yellow in Vermeer’s
View of Delft
that
Proust’s Bergotte contemplates before killing himself, and now a wind-filled tree in a Cézanne landscape forever free from the gaze of man, and now the smoothness of a stone fished from the bed of the Rhine, and now the golden engravings on a pencil leaving a yellow shadow in the inside margin of a book’s page, and now Joyce’s inhuman lament at Lucia’s worsening state and his own blindness, and now Valéry’s explication how the
Wake
was nothing but a magnificent waste, and now the backbreaking work in the red farms of Roussillon, and now the agreeable weight on the spine of a sack of grain for chopping wood for the farm owner, and now the Irish sun slipping past the flowing mane of a galloping horse in the racetrack in Leopardstown, and now the stolen Staunton chess set of his father, and now that shiny black pawn about to be promoted on the board, and now Duchamp’s voice telling of the invisible tears of rage and impotence welling up in him as he sat in the taxi clasping his
Nude
tight across his chest, and now the dirty chamber pot carried past a group of people at lunch in the middle of the day, and now the joy of mounting a camel in the Sahara, and now the inverted moon seen in the curve of the Atlas Mountains, and now the silhouette of a woman waiting in a Tangier teahouse, and now a line of Dante, and now the clear image behind that line, and now an old, wrinkled face in a frosty night, and now the beat of his own steps, and now the delicious sound of the club hitting the ball on the golf course in Belfast, and now that moment of pure emptiness that makes the sound delicious, and now the fall back into the mess of existence, and now the lilt of a trumpet in a jazz bar in Holland, and now the red in the Mandala on the wall of that bar, and now the taste of blood in his mouth, and now those resigned yet definitive words:
Je ne sais pas
,
Monsieur. Je m’excuse
, what charming manners!, and now the words merging to form that one word he has been trying to make for years, a word as long and hard as an excited member, and now the swing of the heavy blade chopping the member free of
the body, and now the sound of his wife working on the sewing machine in her room, and now the look in her eyes that bespoke not just despair and anger at his nights of dissipation, but pity, both for herself and him, and that other thing which he can’t put into words but only compare, to what?, yes, that look he saw in the eyes of Artaud sitting lost in a café in Saint-Germain-des-Prés so many years ago, a look that will die with him, for he knows he was its sole witness.

Not another time, he had told himself, will he wander. Not again could he hold inside him that look in her eyes. But love by then had already left his bones, like a tide on ebb, and was held back only by a weak flesh. Thus the promise was forgotten one evening in Berlin, though this was not intended.

Rehearsals had not been going well. The ashcans, in spite of everything, were not exactly as he had seen them in his head. The actors were simply overdoing it. Too much colour, he kept repeating, too much colour. He had walked back from the Academy, unable to enjoy the view of the river. Is it ever possible to be true to an image, he wondered? Swiftly cutting through the trees, he entered the café opposite his studio, which went by the unlikely name of “Giraffe.” The fare was ordinary, to say nothing of the wine, but the place was quiet on most evenings and made him feel at ease. And before he knew, the woman he had agreed to meet there was speaking to him. First he answered without looking, smoking away absently. But presently he turned, and it was the angle that did him in. The yearning sprang at him with a simple twist of the neck. The first and last thing he saw was the milk-white earlobe with a beautiful pearl in it, entirely free of the dark hair that soared and coiled up right behind the head into a soft ball. His legs began to shake and, for a moment, like in Proust, he went deaf. This dreary world, it occurred to him, was also the best of all worlds. Like a hologram, it gleamed with a mere tilt of the arm.

He wakes up in a sweat. Even after hours he is not free of the
dream. In his own garage, he saw a large iguana in birth pangs behind a red sports car, watched, at the same time as himself, in terror and fascination by a man he surely knows well but about whom he seems to have forgotten everything else.

Outside a thrush is singing in the cedar grove. He leaves his oak desk and, taking the water flask off the shelf, drinks from it greedily. Looking at these trees he planted years ago and which he has carefully tended through so many harsh winters fills him with a sudden longing for this earth which, he is well aware, he should soon be leaving. Two months, two years, not much more. The trunk of that blue cedar, he tells himself, already carries all the wisdom of Goethe and Shakespeare. A pity it has taken him so long to see the simple fact. The eye deceives. The eye cannot truly see until the last tear has been expunged. Which, of course, isn’t the case with him.

Yesterday he found a flute in the cottage. His nephew’s surely. Distractedly, he blows into it and from its modest wooden depths rises, note by note, a strange, tremulous melody as if heard from the ends of the earth or such as coming to him uninterrupted from a night of some ancient race beneath ancient star clouds. The bird watches him, ready to respond. But instead of the birdsong he hears a faint, unmistakably Irish voice reciting, no, singing with a slow soft breath the words of his youth, penned one damp, drunk and homesick afternoon in a bar in Soho.
Oh hand in hand let us return to the dear land of our birth, the bays, the bogs, the moors, the glens, the lakes, the rivers, the streams, the brooks
,
the mists, the – fens
…

Try as he might, he cannot put a face to that moving voice, he who has seen so many faces in dreams and waking. Burying his chin for warmth into the loose collar of his much-worn ash-blue turtleneck, he moves his tongue over the growth in his mouth which doesn’t pain him anymore. His mind is elsewhere, igniting the fire of memory by fanning the embers. Suddenly the flames are glowing and leaping higher and higher, and a smile slices his
lips after many days even as he wipes away the tear that is about to drip.

*

The boat is bobbing up and down on the waves. Beneath an indigo vault heavy with stars, so many that they make a complete mess of the designs the ancients saw in them, the air is neither cold nor warm. He has removed the oars from the water and is rubbing his palms to calm the blood coursing through them. In the distance he can see the lights twinkling on the shore, and beyond these he can feel the mountains rearing their dark bulk. Across from him, his blind companion, his arms clasping the plank on either side, is alertly listening to the plash of water on the timber as if he can detect in it the rumble of clouds over an unknown planet.