The Decay Of The Angel (11 page)

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Authors: Yukio Mishima

BOOK: The Decay Of The Angel
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He loved only distant images that were no reflection of himself. If, that is to say, he loved anything.
Who and what might the old man have been?
Here in the room he had only been someone for that spoiled, overdressed old woman to bother; but now a separate presence remained behind, that of a quiet old man.
Tired, erudite, intelligent old eyes, a voice so low that Tōru had had difficulty in catching it, a politeness that almost seemed to verge on ridicule. What was he enduring?
Tōru had never before met anyone quite like him. He had never before seen the will to dominate take such quiet form.
Everything should have been old knowledge; and yet there was something in the old man that caught on a corner of Tōru’s awareness like a rock snag and would not give way. What might it be?
But presently cool arrogance returned, and he ceased to speculate. The old man was a lawyer in retirement. That was enough. The politeness was a professional manner, nothing more. Tōru detected and was ashamed of a tendency in himself toward rustic wariness.
Getting up to warm his dinner, he threw a wad of paper into the wastebasket, and caught a glimpse of the withered hydrangea.
“Today it was a hydrangea. She poked it in my hair as she left. Yesterday a cornflower. The time before a gardenia. The wanderings of a demented mind? Or have they some meaning? Maybe it’s not just her idea. Maybe someone puts a flower in her hair every day and she carries some sort of signal without knowing it? She always does all the talking, but next time I have to ask her.”
Perhaps there was nothing of the accidental or the random in events that took place around Tōru. Suddenly it seemed that a fine pattern of evil was taking shape around him.
12
 
 H
ONDA WAS SILENT
through dinner, and Keiko was too startled to talk.
“Are you coming to my room?” she asked as they left the table. “Or shall I go to yours?”
Always when they traveled together they went after dinner to the room of one or the other and talked over whiskey. If either pleaded fatigue the other understood.
“I’m not feeling as tired as I did. I’ll be with you in maybe a half hour.” He took her wrist and looked at the number on her key. She found endlessly amusing the pride he took in this little public display of intimacy. He could be amusingly intimate one instant and somberly, threateningly judicial the next.
She changed clothes. She would make fun of him. But she reconsidered. She saw that she could make fun of him without restraint when the matter was a serious one; but it was a law between them that the frivolous must always be serious.
They sat at the small table by the window. Honda ordered the usual bottle of Cutty Sark. Keiko was looking at the swirls of mist outside. She took out a cigarette. Cigarette in hand, she wore a sterner, tenser expression than usual. She had long ago given up the foreign affectation of waiting for him to light a match. He had always disliked it.
Abruptly she spoke. “I’m shocked, utterly shocked. The idea of taking in a child you know nothing about. I can think of only one explanation. You’ve kept your proclivities hidden from me. How blind I’ve been. We’ve known each other for eighteen years and I never suspected. I see now. There can be no doubt about it. We’ve had the same urges all along, and all along they’ve brought us together and made us feel secure, comrades and allies. Ying Chan was just a stage property. You knew about her and me, and were playing your part. A person can’t be too careful.”
“That isn’t it at all. She and the boy are identical.” He spoke with great firmness.
Why, she asked over and over again. How were they identical?
“I’ll tell you when the whiskey comes.”
It came. She had no choice but to await his words. She had lost the initiative.
Honda told her everything.
It pleased him that she should listen so carefully. She refrained from the usual overgeneralized response.
“You have been wise to say and to write nothing about it.” Whiskey had produced a voice of smooth charity and benevolence. “People would have thought you mad. The trust you have built up would have collapsed.”
“Trust no longer means anything to me.”
“That’s not the point. Something else you’ve kept hidden from me is your wisdom. No, a secret as violent as the most violent poison, capable of everything horrible, a secret that makes any sort of social secret seem like nothing at all. You could tell me that there are three lunatics in your immediate family, you could tell me you have sexual inclinations of a most curious sort, you could tell me the things most people would be most ashamed to tell me. It would be a social secret, nothing at all. Once you know the truth then murder and suicide and rape and forgery are easy, sloppy things. And what an irony that a judge should be the one. You find yourself caught up in a ring bigger than the skies, and everything else is ordinary. You have discovered that we’ve only been turned out to graze. Ignorant animals, out on loose tether.” Keiko sighed. “Your story has cured me. I think I have fought rather well, but there was no need to fight. We are all fish in the same net.”
“But it is the final blow for a woman. A person who knows what you know can never be beautiful again. If at your age you still wanted to be beautiful, then you should have put your hands over your ears.
“There are invisible signs of leprosy on the face of the one who knows. If leprosy of the nerves and leprosy of the joints are visible leprosy—then call it transparent leprosy. Immediately at the end of knowledge comes leprosy. The minute I set foot in India I was a spiritual leper. I had been for decades, of course, without knowing it.
“Now you know too. You can put on all your layers of makeup, but someone else who knows will see through to the skin. I will tell you what he will see. A skin that is too transparent; a spirit standing dead still; flesh that disgusts by its fleshiness, deprived of all fleshly beauty; a voice that is hoarse; a body stripped of hair, all the hair fallen like leaves. We will soon be seeing all the symptoms in you. The five signs of the decay of the one who sees.
“Even if you don’t avoid people, you’ll find, slowly, that you are being avoided. Unknown to themselves, those who know give off an unpleasant warning odor.
“Fleshly beauty, spiritual beauty, everything that pertains to beauty, is born from ignorance and darkness and from them alone.
It is not allowed to know and still to be beautiful
. If the ignorance and darkness are the same, then a contest between spirit that has nothing at all to hide them and flesh that hides them behind its own dazzling light is no contest at all. Beauty is only beauty of the flesh.”
“Yes, it is true. It was true of Ying Chan,” said Keiko, light reminiscence in her eyes as she looked out at the mists. “And that I suppose is why you told neither Isao the Second nor Ying Chan the Third.”
“A cruel sort of solicitude, I suppose, from a fear of obstructing fate. It kept me from speaking. But it was different with Kiyoaki. I did not then know the truth myself.”
“You want to say that you were beautiful yourself.” She cast a sarcastic eye from his head to his feet.
“No. I was industriously polishing the instruments to let me know.”
“I understand. I am to keep it absolutely secret from the boy until he is twenty and ready to die.”
“That is correct. You only have to wait four years.”
“You are quite sure you won’t die first?”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“We must make another appointment with the Cancer Research Institute.”
Glancing at her watch, Keiko took out a small box filled with multicolored pills. She quickly selected three with her nail tips and drank them down with Scotch.
Honda had kept one thing from Keiko: that the boy they had met today was clearly different from his predecessors. The mechanism of his self-awareness was as apparent as if it lay behind a window. He had seen nothing of the sort in the other three. It seemed to him that the internal workings of the boy and his own were as alike as two peas. It was impossible that such could be the case—and yet, might the boy be that rarity, someone who knows and is all the more beautiful for knowledge? But that was impossible. If it was impossible, then, carrying all the proper marks, the proper age and the three moles, might the boy be the first instance of a cleverly wrought counterfeit set down before Honda?
They were beginning to feel sleepy. The talk moved to dreams.
“I very seldom dream,” said Keiko. “Even now I sometimes do dream of examinations, though.”
“They say you go on having dreams of examinations all through your life. I haven’t had one in ten years.”
“That’s because you were a good student.”
But it seemed altogether inappropriate to be talking with Keiko of dreams. It was like talking to a banker about knitting.
Finally they went off to their rooms. Honda had the sort of dream he had denied ever having, a dream of an examination.
On the second floor of a wooden frame schoolhouse, rocking so violently that it might have been hanging from a branch of a tree, Honda, in his teens, took up the answer sheets being passed briskly down rows of desks. Kiyoaki, he knew, would be two or three seats behind him. Looking from the questions on the blackboard to the answer sheets, Honda felt very sure of himself. He sharpened his pencils to chisels. He had the answers immediately. There was no need to hurry. The poplars outside were swaying in the wind.
He awoke in the night and every detail of the dream came back to him.
It had without question been a dream of an examination, and yet Honda had had none of the harried feelings that should go with such dreams. What had made him dream?
Since only he and Keiko knew of their conversation and it was not Keiko, then it had to be Honda himself. But he had not had the slightest wish to dream. He would not have made himself dream without consulting his own wishes in the matter.
Honda had of course read many books on Viennese psychoanalysis; but he could not accept the principle that one’s wish was to betray oneself. No: it was more natural to believe that someone outside was keeping a close watch, and importuning.
Awake he had volition and, whether he wished it or not, was living in history; but somewhere back in the darkness was someone, historical perhaps, nonhistorical perhaps, setting him against dreams.
The mists would seem to have cleared and the moon to have come out. The window, a little too tall for the curtain, was shining at the bottom a faint silver-blue, like a shadow of the giant reclining peninsula beyond the waters. So India would look, thought Honda, to a ship approaching from the Indian Ocean at night. He went back to sleep.
13
 
 A
UGUST
10.
Beginning his shift at nine in the morning, Tōru as always opened the newspaper once he was alone. No ships were due until afternoon.
The paper was filled with stories of the industrial wastes that had floated ashore at Tago. There were some fifty paper mills at Tago, but Shimizu had only one, and that a small one. The prevailing currents were moreover eastward, and industrial wastes rarely came into Shimizu Harbor.

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