The Decay Of The Angel (24 page)

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Authors: Yukio Mishima

BOOK: The Decay Of The Angel
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It was two in the afternoon. The register for nine in the morning had been posted: the
Chung Lien II
, Panamanian, 2,167 tons; a Soviet ship; the
Hai-i
, Chinese, 2,767 tons; the
Mindanao
, Philippine, 3,357 tons. The
Khabarovsk
, a Soviet ship bringing numbers of Japanese passengers from Nahodka, was due at two thirty. The view of the ships was good from the second floor of the terminal building, slightly higher than their decks.
They looked out over the prow of the
Chung Lien
, and the stir in the harbor beyond.
It was not unusual for the two of them, as the seasons passed, to stand thus side by side in confrontation with grandeur. Perhaps indeed it was the position best for the Hondas, father and son. If the “relationship” between them consisted in using nature as a mediator between their separate awarenesses, knowing that evil results from a direct meeting, then they were using nature as a giant filter to turn brine into potable water.
Below the prow of the
Chung Lien
was the lighter anchorage, like an accumulation of bobbing driftwood. Marks and signs on the concrete pier forbidding automobiles suggested the aftermath of a game of hopscotch. A dirty smoke drifted in from somewhere, and there was an incessant chugging of engines.
The paint had flaked from the dark hull of the
Chung Lien.
The bright red of the rust-preventive painted a pattern around the prow like an aerial map of harbor installations. The rusty stockless anchor clung to the hawse pipe like a great crab.
“What is the cargo, all done up in neat, long bundles? Like spindles.” Honda was already scrutinizing the stevedores at work on the
Chung Lien
.
“Boxes of some sort, I’d imagine.”
Satisfied that his son knew no more than he, Honda turned his attention to the shouts of the stevedores and labor such as he had not known in his life.
The astonishing thing was that the flesh, the muscles, the organs (the brain aside) given to a human being should through the whole of a long life of indolence have been blessed with health and a superfluity of money. Nor had Honda wielded great powers of creativity or imagination. Only cool analysis and solid judgment had been his. He had made money enough through them. He felt no pangs of conscience at the sweating stevedores he saw in action or in pictures, but he did feel a nameless irritation. The scenes and the objects and the movements before him were not the reality of something he had touched and taken profit from. They were a barrier, an opaque wall forever laughing derisively at both sides, daubed all over with smelly paint, between him and some unseen unreality and the unseen people taking profit from it. And the figures so vivid on the wall were themselves in the tightest bondage, controlled by someone else. Honda had never wanted to be thus in opaque bondage, but he had no doubt that they were the ones who had their anchors like ships, deep in life and being. Society paid recompense only for sacrifice. Intelligence was paid in measure proportionate to the sacrifice of life and being.
But there was no point in worrying at this late date. All he had to do was enjoy the movements before him. He thought of the ships that would come into the harbor after he was dead, and sail off for sunny lands. The world overflowed with hopes of which he was not part. If he were a harbor himself, however hopeless a harbor, he would have to give anchorage to a number of hopes. But as it was, he might as well declare to the world and to the sea that he was a complete superfluity.
And if he were a harbor?
He glanced at the single little boat in Honda Harbor, Tōru here beside him, engrossed in the unloading operations. A boat that was exactly the same as the harbor, rotting with the harbor, refusing forever to leave. Honda, at least, knew it. The ship was cemented to the pier. They were a model father and son.
The great dark holds of the
Chung Lien
were agape. The cargo overflowed the mouths of the holds. The figures of stevedores in brown sweaters and green bellybands of gold-threaded wool were half visible on the mountains of cargo, their yellow helmets bobbing as they shouted up at the cranes. The myriad iron lines of the derrick shook with their own shouts, and as the cargo wavered precariously in the air it blotted out and then revealed again the gold-lettered name of the passenger ship tied up at Central Pier.
An officer in a white cap was supervising the operations. He was smiling. It would seem that he had shouted a loud joke to encourage the stevedores.
Tired of the unloading operations, the father and son walked to a point from which they could compare the stern of the
Chung Lien
with the prow of the Soviet ship.
The prow was astir with life, the low stern was deserted. Ochre vents pointed in several directions. Rough piles of garbage. Ancient casks with rusty iron hoops. Life jackets on white railings. Ships’ fittings. Coils of ropes. The delicate white folds of lifeboats under ochre covers. An antique lantern still burned under the Panamanian flag.
The stillness was like that of a Dutch still life, tinged over with the sadness of the sea. It was as if napping with its private parts exposed to the forbidden gaze of landsmen, all the long hours of tedium aboard ship.
The black prow of the Soviet ship with its thirteen silver cranes pressed down from above. The rust of the anchor clinging to the hawse pipe had streaked the hull with red spider webs.
The ropes tying them to land marked off great vistas, three crossed ropes each, trailing beards of Manila hemp. Between the immovable iron screens moved the unresting bustle of the harbor. Each time a little tug with old black tires hanging at its side or a white streamlined pilot boat moved past, it would leave a smooth track in its wake, and the dark irritability would for a time be soothed.
Tōru thought of Shimizu as he had studied it alone on holidays. Something was wrested from his heart each time, he would feel something like a sigh from the great lungs of the harbor, and as he covered his ears against the shouting and roaring and grating, he would taste simultaneously of oppression and liberation, and be filled with a sweet emptiness. It was the same today, though his father had an inhibiting effect.
“I think it was a good thing,” said Honda, “that we broke off with the Hamanaka girl early in the spring. I can talk to you now that you have gotten over it and seem so lost in your studies.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Annoyed, Tōru put a touch of boyish melancholy and gallantry into his words. They were not enough to stop Honda. Honda’s real purpose lay not in apology but in the question he had long been wanting to ask.
“But that letter. Doesn’t it strike you as altogether too stupid? Wasn’t it really too much to have a young girl speak openly of what we had been perfectly aware of and closed our eyes to? Her parents made all sorts of excuses, and the man who first came with the proposal had nothing to say at all when he saw the letter.”
It displeased Tōru that Honda, who had until now not touched upon the matter, should be speaking so plainly, almost too plainly. He sensed that Honda had taken as much pleasure in breaking the engagement as in making it.
“But don’t you suppose all the proposals that come to us are the same?” Elbows on the railing, Tōru did not look up. “Momoko was honest, and so we were able to take early measures.”
“I quite agree. But we mustn’t give up. We’ll find a good girl yet. But that letter—”
“Why should you be so worried about it now?”
Honda gave Tōru a gentle nudge with his elbow. Tōru felt as if he had been jabbed by a bone. “You had her write it?”
Tōru had been expecting the question. “Suppose I did. What would you do?”
“Nothing at all. The only point is that you have found a way of getting through life. We must describe it as a dark way, with no sweetness in it.”
Tōru’s self-respect had been affronted. “I would not want to be thought sweet.”
“But you were very sweet while it was all in process.”
“I was doing as you wanted me to do, I should imagine.”
“Yes.”
Tōru shuddered as the old man bared his teeth to the sea wind. They had reached a point of agreement, and it brought Tōru to thoughts of murder. He could easily enough let them have their way by pushing Honda over; but he feared that Honda was aware of even that impulse. It left him. To have to live was blacker than the most cheerless black. To have to see every day a man who sought to understand, and did understand, the deepest thing inside him.
They had little more to say. After a round of the terminal building, they stood for a time looking at the Philippine ship on the far side.
Directly in front of them was an open door to the crew’s cabins. They could see the scarred linoleum, glowing dully, and, around a corner, the iron rail of a stairway leading downward. The short, empty corridor of the quotidian, of frozen human life, never for a moment away from human beings, on whatever remote seas. In the great white transient ship, that one spot was representative of a dark, dull afternoon corridor in every house. In a vast, unpeopled house as well, where lived only an old man and a boy.
Honda ducked. Tōru had just made a violent motion. Honda caught a glimpse of the word “Notebook” on the rolled-up tablet Tōru had taken from his briefcase. He flung it past the stern of the Philippine ship.
“What are you doing?”
“Notes I don’t need. Scribblings.”
“You’ll be fined if they catch you.”
But there was no one on the pier, and on the ship only a Philippine sailor who looked down at the sea in surprise. The rubber-bound tablet floated for an instant and sank.
A white Soviet ship with a red star on its prow and the name “Khabarovsk” in gold letters was being brought against the pier by a tugboat with masts the color of a thorny broiled lobster. There was a cluster of welcomers at the rail, their hair blowing in the wind. Some were on tiptoes. Children on the shoulders of adults were already shouting and waving.
26
 
 T
HE VERY QUESTION
was indignant when Keiko asked Honda how Tōru meant to spend the Christmas of 1974. Since the September incident, the eighty-year-old Honda had been afraid of everything. His incisiveness had quite left him. He seemed to cower and tremble perpetually, to be a victim of unrelieved disquiet.
This state of affairs was to be explained not only by the September incident. They were now in the fourth year since Honda had adopted Tōru. Through most of those years Tōru had seemed quiet and docile, and there had been little change in him; but this spring he had reached maturity and entered Tokyo University, and everything was changed. He had suddenly come to treat his father as an adversary. He was prompt in putting down every sign of resistance. After Tōru had hit him on the forehead with a fire poker, Honda went to a clinic for a few days to have the wound treated—he told the doctors that he’d had a bad fall. Thereafter he was most attentive in reading and deferring to Tōru’s wishes. Tōru was studiously rude to Keiko, whom he recognized as Honda’s ally.
From long years of avoiding relatives who might be after his money, Honda had no allies prepared to sympathize with him. Those who had opposed the adoption were pleased. Everything had turned out as expected. They set no stock whatsoever by Honda’s complaints. He was only trying to arouse sympathy. Their sympathies were rather with Tōru. Such beautiful eyes, such impeccable deportment, such a devoted sense of filial duty—they could only conclude that a suspicious old man was maligning him. And indeed Tōru’s manners were above reproach.
“There seem to be troublemakers around. Who can have told you such a silly story? Mrs. Hisamatsu, I’m sure. She’s a nice person, but she believes everything Father tells her. I’m afraid he’s pretty far gone. He has delusions. I imagine that’s what happens when you spend so many years worrying about money; but he treats even me, right here under the same roof, like a thief. After all, I am young, and when I talk back he starts telling people I’m not good to him. The time he fell in the garden and hit his head against the root of the plum tree—remember?—he told Mrs. Hisamatsu I’d hit him with a poker. She actually believed it, every last word of it, and that doesn’t give me much room to fight back.”

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