What Happen Then, Mr Bones?, page 19
The old woman begins to struggle to her feet. ‘Let me help you,’ Montague cries, leaping up.
‘No, don’t help me. The few things I can still accomplish become fewer every month. What will become of me when I can no longer get to my feet alone?’
Montague farewells the old woman and watches her hobble slowly off down the Corso. He wishes now he had been more frank with her, regrets not confiding that he has been inspecting the town of his own father’s birth and upbringing, that he has not come here on a whim. Perhaps the old woman might have known his father’s family — but how shameful it would have been to admit to her that he didn’t know his own father’s surname. Perhaps she would have stopped speaking to him if he had so openly declared himself a bastard. But he has not come here for regret. He shakes it off and goes in search of stuffed pancakes at one of the cafés.
The next morning, Montague obtains a horse outside the city walls and rides a short distance along the coast. It is not his intention to take exercise nor to see a great deal of the area, he merely wishes to be trotting near the sea in the thyme-scented sunshine amidst the olives and cypresses, the aloes and oleander, the groves of oaks. All along the stony causeway there are bones in black rags begging alms. These are not Ragusans but beggars from barren northern villages set amidst naked rock. He scatters coins in the dust, and they scrabble for them violently. Dotted here and there, though, are fatter peasants in cleanish and mended rags leading small herds of goats to richer vegetation or bending down in tiny fields to coax sustenance from the apparently troublesome earth.
He settles for a lunch of bread and olives under a pine tree, falls asleep under the cloudless sky and wakes up with a burning thirst. A thin dark boy seated on a dust-dull rug by the side of the causeway sells him two hard oranges from the stunted pyramid stacked beside several tiny limp fish and a few bunches of wilted wildflowers. Montague adds an extra coin to his payment and walks away trying to suck refreshment from the bitter unyielding fruit.
Back inside the city walls in the blue-pink dusk, he stands before the domed fountain of Onofrio de la Cava, admiring the fourteen jets of water and listening to the enigmatic low murmur of the carpet-sellers who have arranged themselves and their beautiful wares on the fountain’s steps. Tomorrow he will visit the harbour a few miles outside the city gates where the nobles have their summer palaces and pleasure gardens. But the day after that he must leave; he has an appointment with a sword-cutler in Marseilles on Friday.
5
Montague is already old when he meets the widowed Violet Medora Plantagenet Millard. Indeed, he believes himself to be a ruin and, shamed, his heart turns away from her right from the beginning, although his person must stand fast and talk.
‘Here is the boy,’ she says, pushing her son forward.
Montague takes the boy by the shoulders, stands him squarely in front of him and looks him over carefully. ‘What is his name?’
‘His name is John, sir.’
‘Well, we’ll see. John, see that fair boy over there. That is the boy you will learn to fight. Do you want to learn? Or does your mother want you to?’
‘I do.’
‘That’s good then. When a boy fences only because of his mother, he doesn’t learn anything. The boy himself has to want it. Now, go over to the lad I pointed out to you and he will teach you the preparation exercises. You must do them exactly as he says, and in the exact order. I will be watching you.’
John scampers across the gymnasium floor to the fair boy who has been pointed out to him, and Montague turns to the mother. ‘You can go now,’ he says.
‘I would like to stay and watch,’ Violet replies, and she moves over to one of the wooden benches that line the walls before the fencing master can object.
The lesson is long and arduous and the fencing master strict. Indeed, a mild panic arises in Violet’s motherly breast. Surely boys of so tender an age should not be treated thus? Even an adult might become afraid of him. Could I become afraid of him? Violet wonders, looking more closely at the fencing master. It is then that she notices his ravaged skin, the vertical tendency of his alarming hair and the opacity of his brown eyes — they look like doors that have been slammed shut on all human connection.
When the fencing lesson is over, Violet rises to meet her son, expecting him to be tired and subdued, but the boy is ecstatic. ‘A real fighter,’ the fencing master proclaims as he walks past. ‘You can bring him again tomorrow.’
Montague watches the woman take her son out of the gymnasium. It’s not true that he hasn’t noticed her, he certainly has, how could he not — the glowingness of her. When she entered the gymnasium, soft heat and light accompanied her. But heat and light demand a circle of people wanting to warm themselves, whereas he prefers the long shadows. He prefers to embrace the cold rather than be left in it.
There is not much that can be held onto in a life: it is better to know what you have, not merely to make the most of it, which is resignation, but to make something of it, which is work. That woman would be a pinchbeck distraction, a glistering temptation, a false solution — leave her to the young men who believe they have the time for such blind alleys. No, there is some inexplicable satisfaction in going home to an empty, unlit house. When Montague lights the fire in his grate, when he lights his candles, the shadows don’t flee, they roam the walls companionably. He knows he can count on all of this because he makes it for himself.
He has a woman in to clean, of course. On the days she has been there the cauldron is bubbling over the fire when he returns. This is not the gift of some obliging female who at any moment might turn shrewish; this is something he pays for. So he is peaceful when he extracts from the cauldron the pastry-sealed earthenware pot that contains his tender herbed and buttered meat (often a small bird or a hare), when he fishes out of the bubbling water the net bag containing his savoy, artichokes or kale, when he draws out the bulging pudding-cloth containing his sweet custard or Jamaica-pepper pudding. As long as he has money in his purse he need not rely on gifts of kindness or pity, such unreliable sources of provender. On the evenings when he must make his own provision, he is happy with his salmagundi, his dark bread and market cheese, his own company.
After eating, he sits in front of the roaring fire and reads. He is not a rich man but he has inherited a fine library, not that he has a separate room for his inheritance — the books must be stacked in the hallway. Montague also reads current and old newspapers, and thus he knows not only the times he lives in but also those that preceded them. The contradictions of the present moment are enough to give a man a fiendish headache if he does not know anything about the days that made them.
On rare special occasions Montague employs a turnspit to roast his portion of mutton or pork. For a few coins a ragged boy will happily turn the broach in front of the hot fire for five hours while the small gathering of men quaff ale and argue loudly. Of course Montague could afford the latest device — the weight-driven clockwork jack mounted on the side of fireplaces that does away with the need for a human scullion. Or a stray dog could be put into the wheel that turns the spit. But he likes to see the cold boy grow warm and pink, likes to give him a good helping of choice meat slices. The coins will be handed over, but the hot meat will line his thin belly like charity.
These half-drunk, argumentative men and this boy are enough — what would he want a woman here for, with her fashions and foibles, her moods and demands, her deceptive heat and light? What would he want a woman here for, he repeats to himself. He is already an old man, with old man’s fat on his stomach, and thin hair and missing teeth, and neither is he a young man on the inside. No, once you want peace, once you believe that life involves stillness, once you realise talking doesn’t invariably connect you to other human beings but often creates only obstruction, you are already more than halfway to being an old monk who loves only food and tenebrous calm.
Montague does not even covet Violet Medora’s younger flesh, beside which his own would lie like a ruin. He knows there is a world full of old men with animal drives and no pride who care nothing for the way the young despise them, but he is not one of them. It is too hard for a man to be despised and not end up despising himself. And he does not have the time to despise himself, to castigate himself for the way the body uncontrollably ages. He only has time to understand the aging of his mind, which is slowly detaching itself from bodily things, and from the ways of the world, and from the heaving anonymous crush of people. And from particular people. It is not merely the crowd his thoughts are shrinking from.
Now he also shrinks from anyone who forces him to be false with himself. If you live long enough you will finally be driven to be exactly who you are, no more and no less. We will all have to go before our Maker utterly naked. Although more likely, Montague thinks, we will disperse like the atoms of Democritus towards the stars or, even more likely, the cold earth, because how can he believe in the eternal life of the soul after what his own mother had told him, his mother apparently being the civilised world’s first atheist.
Violet Medora is lonely. Even the beautiful can be lonely — although we scarcely dare to believe it, since what hope is there for the rest of us if the beautiful are going begging? But why shouldn’t the beautiful be lonely? What private consolation are their looks? They can’t stand about in front of mirrors all day: like the rest of us, they must meet the world facing outwards.
We have intimated that the world looks back, but Violet Medora is also an intelligent woman. The company she needs is not that of the stallion. Nor will she be inclined to fall for the compelling vanity of teaching raw youth about love. For her, the love of a boy would not be enough: there would be wastes and deserts unwatered inside her, and that is not love. Love is to experience relief from one’s own aridity, no matter how temporary, and the moisture of young love is vaporific, mostly spume.
Despite her loneliness, Violet resolves to stop the fencing lessons. She shouldn’t have let this attachment happen. In the last five days, during one-sentence interchanges, the fencing master has used the words patience, shame, soul, love and kill to her, and she is startled. He uses words like nails. He hammers them into her while she stands rooted to the floor. But somehow, each day when she leaves, she still has not resigned her son’s lessons, and she is angry with herself, and angry with the fencing master, even though John skips along happily and babbles about sword-play all the way home.
The situation might have remained in this stasis had not an autumn storm sent a huge oak with its useless panoply of clattering acorns crashing through the roof of the gymnasium. Violet is sheltering at home when Montague comes to her door to explain that she must not bring her son to his fencing classes until the roof has been repaired or he has acquired new premises — he is not sure which will be quickest, he will have to let her know. It is cold in the late-afternoon wind, Violet notices out loud, would he care for a hot drink? He hesitates. Unbeknownst to him, this is his only chance to be alone for ever and he misses it.
Montague steps through the open door into the soft warmth, and by the time he leaves several hours later there have been tears on both sides, since what has been stoppered so bravely in these two is not sexual fluids nor even the finer feelings, but sadness. Though a woman of a certain type might cry in front of anybody, Violet Medora feels as naked as if she’d been undressed, and though a man cannot cry in front of anyone, not even himself, Montague is not ashamed but utterly refreshed. A rose blooms violently in the desert of his heart. In Violet Medora’s matching desert, purple and white crocuses spread and open out like happiness.
When Montague first embraces Violet Medora after their small and sudden wedding, he understands how hard-hearted and unforgiving the effort of not wanting has made him. How he has slowly murdered his own life, has throttled everything that surrounded what was withheld since he did not have the power to force its hand or kill it. Thus, wanting love, he despised women, avoided their company or spoke brusquely, made virtue of solitude and self-sufficiency, commanded himself to prefer shades to human flesh, endowed the haggard succubae that rode his nightmares with ethereal beauty, fell in love with his own darkness. And for her part, Violet Medora understands she never loved anybody before him, and never will again.
Life settles into its new married pattern, which is not significantly different from Montague’s pattern of old, except that the shadows have flown, have departed to take up residence in loneliness’s new domicile, wherever that is. Now there are two of them reading in the evening before the companionable fire. If there were dogs they would stretch right out in their animal warmth and satisfaction, but there are not dogs, only rugs that can be sat upon without objection. Violet begins working her way through Montague’s stacks of books and one winter evening she comes back from the hallway bearing a large leather-bound book with neither publisher’s impress nor title.
‘What is this?’ she asks.
‘It’s a book my mother left me,’ Montague replies lazily. He has eaten well and the fire is hot; he is contented in the flesh as only a husband can be. He feels inclined to doze rather than talk.
Violet opens the book at the first page and reads aloud:
‘The foreigner says, “I laugh when I’m happy, cry when I’m sad, and when I love someone, I really love them.” I could have laughed at such naïveté but instead murmur, “And when they autopsy you, you really should be dead.” Then we blink at each other’s strangeness and say no more. The foreigner is from a republic where they say poets have ruled for a thousand years, and perhaps it’s the rule of poets that accounts for such wanton honesty. Not that I want it: a heart on a sleeve is a very tempting thing to smash. But I go home twitching with rage because I know what he is really saying to me: I’m not a dissimulator, don’t think I’m just pretending not to like you. How good it must make him feel to declare himself so superior and transparent! At home the dust and dirt are waiting for me, but I go straight upstairs and lie on my bed. I hope to fall into a peaceful slumber, for such an occurrence would reveal me cured of my disease of dread, but I do not. I lie rigid with my eyes wide open, and my heart beats so alarmingly I have to sit up and sip from the herbal infusion that the young doctors have left on the table beside the bed …’
‘What is it you are reading?’ Montague interrupts, sitting up in his chair.
‘It’s from the book your mother left you. Didn’t you say that’s what it was?’
‘I thought it was her common-place book. With quotations and recipes and suchlike.’
‘Well, that proves once again one shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.’
‘Read me more.’
‘Are you sure? It seems very intimate.’
‘She left it to me, didn’t she?’
‘How do you know? It’s here, but perhaps she would have wished to dispose of it before she died. Death always catches us unawares.’
‘Death might catch other people unawares. But my mother said death is always stalking us, best be ready.’
‘How grim!’ Violet exclaims.
‘Why? Don’t you think it’s true?’
‘Certainly. But there’s no need to go about saying it. Especially to children.’
‘Nonsense. Children never think it applies to them.’
‘Children die as often as anyone else. Babies even more so.’
‘Babies are completely unperturbed by their own deaths. Dying and being dead require imagination. And even then you have to be able to attach what you imagine to yourself.’
Violet falls silent because she is uncomfortable with the turn of the conversation. Surely there is nothing left to imagine about being dead. What will happen to you is described with precise detail in the Bible.
‘Why have you gone so quiet?’ Montague demands.
‘Don’t you believe what the Bible says?’ Violet bursts out.
‘My mother said that what the Bible tells us isn’t true. My mother would take me on her knee and whisper in my ear that the soul goes nowhere.’
‘Well, how would she know? Had she been dead before?’
‘It would seem so.’
Violet goes cold all over, feels the chill of evil enter the cosy room.
Montague looks over at his wife, sees that her face has gone pale and that she is trembling. He jumps up and kneels beside her, takes her clammy hands into his own. ‘Please, don’t be frightened,’ he says.
‘If we speak like this, we will go to hell,’ she replies.
‘No. There is no hell. And no heaven either.’
‘Well, what is there?’ Violet cries.
‘My mother said that of the time she was dead — at least a day, or perhaps two — she had no memory. She said one would expect a strange and fabulous journey, a journey amongst angels and seraphim, amongst flowers and light and music. One would expect to be reunited with one’s own dead mother and one’s siblings who died in childhood. But no. There was completely nothing. Not even time. That when they brought her alive again …’
‘Who? Who brought her alive again?’
‘The doctors. When they had done it, she said nothing had intervened between her former alive state and her regained one. Nothing had intervened.’
Violet snatches her hands from Montague and covers her ears, and as she does so the leather-bound book slips from her lap and hits the carpet with a dull thud. Montague picks it up and takes it back to his own chair. He sits down and opens it at the first page.
‘She would have meant me to read it,’ he tells his wife gently when she has taken her hands away from her ears. ‘Why else would she have written it? And you know she didn’t die suddenly the second time. She could easily have disposed of it. There’s only one question.’
