Paradise and Elsewhere (5 page)

“Indeed. I find my way around this city by memory, the feel of the ground under my feet, my sense of where shadows fall—and something more than any of these—a feeling that I have always known the city of Sidda. Outside I carry a stick, but here it has never seemed necessary.

“To return to the alphabet. Whilst it has so far been impossible to decode more than a handful of words, we have learned the way in which it was written: not left to right, right to left or up and down, but starting always with the first symbol enclosed in a square centrally positioned in the available space. The next would be to the top left corner, top right corner, bottom right, bottom left; those following would be positioned between the top right of the outer top left symbol and the top left of the outer top right symbol and so on, forming a regular pattern like checks—or a honeycomb—of symbols and space. We think, for instance, that these symbols make up the word for
her
or
his
, and these make up the word for bowl. Perhaps this one is bone. Of course, we have no idea as to which sound a given letter represents. It's my view the alphabet will never be fully understood.”

Mr. Melanoma holds his piece of pottery out to give it back. I slip mine in my bag: it'll do no harm, I think. There are plenty more.

The thick pink walls cut off our view of the desert; the path that snaps like brittle bones beneath our feet leads straight as a die to the sculpture where Sidney Carbourne tied his camel.

“It's the only pictorial image of any kind the Siddanese left in their city,” our guide says. “The stone is of uniform colour, but see how the texture varies”—he reaches out—“here porous, here almost as smooth as glass, with the smoothest pieces of all used for the face and arms. Note the intricacy of the work on the face: no less than forty pieces, carefully chosen to indicate the ears, nose and mouth. The space beneath the brows is blank—and what other reason could there be for this than that the Siddanese knew how they differed from others? This sculpture could rank alongside any of the great pieces in the world, above them all, I say, for consider how it was made without sight and without tools, other than perhaps another stone to knock a corner off here and there: what judgment and patience, what philosophy, must have gone into its construction!

“Around this statue, ladies and gentlemen, the Siddanese gathered to produce and appreciate their culture. They travelled many miles from their flimsy homes, going always on foot. They sang and played instruments, they told stories and riddles, and drank an intoxicant brewed from moulds cultivated inside the mouths of the thirty-nine pits beyond the square. Traces of this mould have been found on the concave surfaces of the pottery fragments we have discussed, and inside the hexagonal towers which we deduce to be public kitchens. Under the influence of this drink, they became convinced that they could read the future. They saw or guessed how their own demise would come, and how the sighted world would inevitably misunderstand their achievements. Consider these people, blind, scattered, knowing themselves to be unique in their peaceful and economical culture: proud, and justifiably so, but also vulnerable, afraid and alone. Perhaps it's not surprising that they wanted to build a city such as this, itself a riddle that could be unlocked only by the knowing touch of those, like them, free of the distraction of sight.

“Ladies and gentlemen, you have here a moving testimony as to the diversity of our species. For almost two thousand years the Siddanese lived here, in a completely different manner from the other peoples of the world. Navigating in their inner darkness across the desert, they built a city without the use of tools; they refrained from eating meat or using animals as beasts of burden, they avoided trade and eschewed science: developing not astronomy like the Egyptians nor geometry like the Greeks but their own austere metaphysics and philosophy. Whilst all the other peoples of the globe were slaves to superstition, the Siddanese pondered the problems of communication and interpretation, fitting one stone carefully on top of the next. Whilst others looked back to the origins of the gods and sought to bend nature to their own will, the Siddanese felt their way forward to the future and guessed what was to come. But as well as all this, I like to think of them as a deeply sensual as well as a serious people, rather as I like to see myself.” He smiles at us properly for the first time.

“We are lucky, I think, that such a people lived. You may take photographs if you wish, though remember, this place is not designed to appeal to the eyes! There are various publications on sale by the entrance, and some small-scale replicas of the statue: an intriguing puzzle which you can try to assemble yourselves. I suggest that in the few remaining minutes you close your eyes and explore Sidda by touch, for it's only in darkness that its full beauty can be appreciated.”

Nowadays no one asks questions of a guide. It either works or it does not. He moves to wait in the shade for the next group. Gratefully, I close my eyes again and wander, arms outstretched, blundering unpractised until my fingers touch Sidda's walls. I feel the sun's fatal heat on my back as I trace the border between one stone and the next. I slip my fingernail into the gap between. I feel how in these last hot days and years the world is full of parables, prefiguration and correspondence. Even half-truths or outright lies hide lessons and examples, and somewhere, beneath one of these dry stones, curled like a bug, is hope. I can hear other people on the path, and the cry of the veiled woman's child, but apart from that it is quiet under the dome. I press against the wall, opening myself to its roughness and accumulated warmth. I have come to my last site. I want to touch our guide, to take his hand in mine—it would be dry and warm, like the stone—with my eyes still closed.

I know that there may be yet other guides. I know that they may even come in shapes different than ours—limbless, green-skinned, minute, extra-sensory, photosynthetic, mechanic, invisible: “We're nearing the end of our tour. Just one more thing—below is the planet earth. Mostly desert now, though once it was uniquely fertile and inhabited by many forms of life, one of which came to dominate, and, we guess, was responsible for the change. We're passing now over one of the smaller sites they occupied: you can see the form of a circle, and inside that a square, with several smaller circles scattered about. These beings left their mark, but they had no culture to speak of, and have often been compared, in their compulsion to build and multiply without thought, to the blue beetles which caused such havoc on our planet some years ago.”

“But on what evidence do we make such statements about their culture?” says one of these beings, maybe not through lips and teeth with air, but somehow, somehow. “No one's troubled to go and look, have they?” Already it's gone, passed from view; but the shape of Sidda and the idea of those earth-beetles long ago move her, and she decides she will return one day to vindicate their name…

That's hope! I walk slowly beside the wall, just grazing it with my fingertips. I sense where it ends just before my fingers slip into air. And I believe the blind man who waits in the shade; I must. I have closed my eyes and touched one of the wonders of the world, forgotten for a moment the terrible heat and the fearful sound of a wind blowing full of sand.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Low Tide

 

 

 

 

I
t was hot,
the sky a bowl of blue; waves slapped against the rock. I remember still the astounding sensation of the air on my face, stomach, shoulders, back and limbs—all over, like invisible hands. How it was to stand upright on new legs and feet: utterly strange, yet easy, and then, a moment later, such a feeling of weight! The land's pull made each step an intentional thing and turned mere standing into an act of resistance. Intensely aware of my new flesh, I waded ashore and walked along the beach, leaving my prints in damp, newly exposed sand: my heels, the balls of my feet, my ten toes.

At the far end of the bay was a small island and a white and red lighthouse. A rowboat had been dragged up on the beach and by the boat stood a man, watching me through binoculars. Did his watching change me that first time? Or did I, wet-dreaming until I caught fire, invent him, then split my pelt with longing and climb out of it? Maybe it was both of these things; in any case, at the beginning neither of us cared. When I drew closer, I noticed his clothes: long pants, a shirt, a jacket, all of them faded by the sun and ruffled by the breeze. Thinking that I might yet need my old sleek skin I looked back then to the rocks, but the tide had turned and they were all but submerged. For a moment then I felt the sharpness of the sand blown in the breeze, and knew that the sun could burn me. And I missed my kind, the underwater sounds, all the old freedoms, but I told myself:
No matter, you must go on now
, and walked towards the man, who let the binoculars hang about his neck and strode, then ran to meet me.

His beard and hair were a mid brown, wiry, trimmed, if roughly so. I liked his face. It broke open and contradicted itself: he smiled, yet his cheeks were wet, his eyes, sea-green, wide with astonishment.

“I knew you must come back!” He gasped for breath, his hands heavy on my shoulders. “But not like this! Where the hell are your clothes?” He laughed, sloughed his jacket, held it out for me, though I did not feel embarrassed, despite the way his gaze exposed me even as I covered myself. I noticed his skin glistened with sweat. Would mine do the same?

“I've come from the sea,” I told him, “I left my coat on the rock.” My voice emerged rough-edged, sore. He raised the binoculars again. “I think I see something dark in the water. We'll take the boat and look.”

So we pushed out. He took the oars and I the glasses, and I quickly learned how to use them to bring the distance close. At times I too thought I could see a dark thing floating just below the surface of the water, but once we drew close I understood that it was nothing but a reflection of the rock, and despite him saying that whatever I had left there would likely wash up on the shore, I knew that I must act as if my old skin was gone, and that now I must live on land.

He said he was my
husband
. He kept the lighthouse, and as well as that, he was a kind of artist, one who used science in the service of beauty, he said. Surely I remembered that? And the bed he had built for us on the third floor of the tower? Our wedding day, the drunken priest? The night of the storm?

“I remember none of it,” I told him. I was sitting on a pile of sacks in the stern of the boat. The ocean was flat and glossy, as the tide flowed in and bit by bit filled up the bay it rippled gently as if there were muscles beneath its skin. Reflected light flickered on our faces. The man who claimed to have married me looked away a moment, then back.

“That may be for the best,” he said. “Everything will be better this time, Marina, I promise you. I'm very sorry. I think I had every right to be angry, but I never meant to hurt you.”

Naturally, I marked the word,
hurt
. And yet I knew that it was not me that he spoke of, and he seemed sincere. I liked his smoothness, the lean, muscular look of him, his strong-fingered hands, the intensity of his gaze. And that first time, constrained as we were by oars shelved to each side of us and by the struts and seats but most of all by being in a small vessel floating on the roof of my former world, can only be called exquisite: sex so gentle in its beginnings, so constrained and restrained—yet only seeming so, for within those limits our bodies' sensations were amplified like voices trapped in a cave, and at the end, shuddering, we broke free of all bounds, left the world and returned to it as if new. I saw, afterwards, that his hand bled from where he had slipped it between me and the floor of the boat.

 

M
arina, he called me
, yet he never thought to introduce himself and I discovered his name only after he had taught me to read. From the start, he taught me a great deal. That first day he showed me how to manage the oars and it was I who pulled us back to the lighthouse island, along the narrow cove to the one place where it was possible, at certain times of day, to land. Together we hauled the boat beyond the tide mark and secured it with rocks. “You can walk around the island in an hour,” he told me. By then, he had stopped saying that surely I remembered, and simply explained how things were and would be, though he frequently grasped my hand, as if to be sure that I was real.

He showed me a vegetable garden, a garden shed, a chicken coop, a smoke hut. The keeper's cottage, low with thick walls and small windows, was built right up against the tower. A smaller dwelling closer to the garden stood empty: out of parsimony, he said, the Lighthouse Board had not yet replaced the deputy keeper. His face darkened and he added that it was all the same to him, and likely they never would… “In any case,” he told me, gesturing at the tower, “the deputy is an unnecessary position now that my gearing system has so much improved the efficiency of the clockwork. The winding schedule is very manageable. You'll see.”

In the future, he told me, all lighthouses would be powered by electricity, a thing like lightning, controlled. And they would be connected by another system of wires that carried voices from place to place and even from one continent to another… But the very remotest of them, such as East Point, would likely wait until last. “And so until then,” he said, pushing open the door into the kitchen, which was shady now but still warm from the range on the far wall, “we'll live here and be the world to each other.” He pulled me close and reached under the jacket to feel the slippery heat between my legs. His hands shook as he unfastened the horn buttons, and soon we made good use of the table.

How willing I was! He liked that. Likewise, I told him, and he liked that too. Both of us were greedy for pleasure. But more than that, I craved the deep forgetting at the heart of the act of love, that shedding of the trivial particulars that separate one being, one species, from another. Our desires were attuned, our bodies spoke. He fitted me. I liked him well, from the length and firmness of what he called his member to the gleam of his body hair in the firelight and the long muscles of his arms and legs. He seemed a good mate, even though after the act he must ask, whispering, his lips to my ear, his hands restless on my skin,

“Did you open yourself like this to
him
? Even if you did so, I do forgive you, because you have returned. But tell me, please.”

“I don't understand,” I said and pulled away.

 

A
fterwards
I
was always
raging hungry, but I knew nothing of cooking and kitchens. This too I learned, though only to a degree: I kept my taste for raw things, and ours was a poor diet apart from the fish, mussels, and eggs. We had carrots, potatoes, cabbage and dill. Flour-and-water biscuits. Bitter coffee. Dried beans to be soaked in the pot. Ham. Salted butter and even saltier meats in cans. We frequently needed some brandy to wash down our meal.

And neither could I sew, and I saw no reason to. The machinery of the light interested me more. Above us, burning always, was the enormous light, reached by a long spiral climb that felt to me as if I was ascending inside a giant shell. The four oil lamps at the top of the tower were set inside a first order Fresnel lens taller than a man, a glass beehive, he called it, though also, I thought, it could be an gigantic insect eye. In daytime, the lens glittered and took on the colours of the sea and sky; at night its many planes glowed, so that it appeared to hover in the room: a hallucinatory vessel, a ship that might have travelled from beyond the moon. There were eight bullseyes to magnify the light. Above and below each of these were the panels set with many glass pieces. Each of these nine hundred and forty-four curved sections had been individually cut and ground and then set exact in its curved brass mount. Light, like the sea, was made of waves, he said, and these glass prisms caught and focussed waves into a narrow, concentrated beam that could be seen twenty miles out to sea. Floating on mercury and driven by elaborate clockwork, the lamps revolved inside the lens, giving the beam its characteristic pulse.

Despite the ceiling ventilation it was unbearably hot near the light. Below, in the watch room it was cooler, and there, at five in the morning and five in the afternoon, without fail, we re-filled the kerosene, and wound the clockwork tight. It was a circular room, with strong oak floors to support all our supplies and equipment, and generous windows all around to let in light. There was a desk, where the lighthouse records were written, and shelves where they were kept; a narrow door led out to the observation platform. The platform was also used to support the ladder when the light room windows were cleaned after heavy storms, and in any case, according to regulation, no less than four times a year. Also in the watch room was a bed built out from the wall: Why, he said, add in a journey up and down the spiral stairs when night observations needed to be taken? And why be separated? Why stay down in the gloom of the cottage, when there was so much light to be had and we could see each other so very well
?

“I shouldn't believe in you,” he said, looking up into my face while I knelt astride him on that bed, rocking, squeezing just enough to keep us both on the brink of our double descent, “but I must.”

 

I
always believed in him
. But at night my underwater dreams seemed just as true: the dives and twists, the impossible grace and freedom of a lost world. More than once I woke in tears and the feeling lasted for days: a terrible grief and longing to be where I could no longer survive. All I could do then was gaze out to sea, or walk the shore cursing myself for being careless; I yearned for that dense, oily fur, the fat-sheathed musculature beneath. There was no remedy. But if he was gentle, he could ease me back to the pleasures of our life on the island off East Point, where gulls and terns and albatrosses soared and wheeled and plummeted into the water, and the wind blew clean and constant, bending the low grasses and the wildflowers and the few small trees back towards the mainland, and bringing with it the smells of ozone and kelp and emptiness, while all the time the clouds it pushed across the sky stretched and grew and shrank and grew again.

Still surrounded by the sea, I lived on land, a wife of sorts. I practised my letters. I learned how to keep the record. In a single sentence, that ran across the width of the book, I must include the weather, any passing vessels, any incidents, and the state of the equipment and supplies. I learned about the winds and Mr. Howard's names for the clouds: the veils of cirrostratus, the ominous mounds of cumulonimbus, heavy with rain. I learned how to trim the lamps and clean the parts of lens, how to use the telescope, how to calculate distance, read a chart and judge the course of a ship.

He did explain the camera, yet would not teach me to use it: the apparatus and the process were still in development, he said, the chemicals noxious… More than that, I think, its power was new and excited him to a point that he could not bear to share it. He believed the camera would eventually be able to capture even the subtlest effects of the weather on the sea, and motion itself, but for now, the subject must remain still for minutes on end while the light worked its transformation on the plate. He could not have enough portraits: I posed both with and without clothes, standing, sitting and lolling on the rocks, in the water walking the beach, on the bed; I posed even while I slept, and was later able to see how soft and peaceful my face appeared when my eyes were closed.

 

H
e had a chest of clothing
which he said was mine.
All right!
A woman's, at least, he said. Though why? I was comfortable enough in his shirts.

“Just try them,” he said. “I want to see.” We rifled through and I marvelled at the vast skirts, a boned bodice, at the tiny mother-of-pearl buttons on the placket and sleeves of elaborate shirts patterned with tiny flowers and needle-fine stripes. Everything but the skirts and bloomers looked too small. But the rustle of it all! Such stuff! I tied the corset around my head with a shirt, pulled a pair of drawers over his.

“Like this?”

“Though of course,” he said once our laughter subsided, “this is what you will have to wear when Mr. Davis visits to make the inspection at the end of the month.”

“Really?” I told him, wiping my eyes. “You'll have to show me how.”

He reached into the chest and pulled out two small shapeless pieces of fabric.

“For your legs,” he explained. “Would you please just try them?”

The material, I later learned, was made from moth cocoons and the finest, water-repellent wool of a special breed of sheep; all clothes then were made from beasts and plants. And the stockings did settle lightly on my skin, almost but not quite as if they were part of me. Serious, then, he fetched his camera, set up the stand, then posed me on the bed all but nude, propped up on my elbows, legs akimbo, in such a way that any viewer's gaze would follow the dark lines of my stockinged legs to where my sex, part anemone, part oyster, stretched between the two white strips of upper thigh.