The Pole and Other Stories, page 11
‘And?’
‘And I cannot tell you more.’
‘But you promised us a story. What you have told us is not a story, just the premise for a story. Unless you go on, you have not kept your word.’
‘She does not have to be a secretary. The man takes a job in the city of X and in due course is invited, with his wife, to the home of a colleague, and the colleague’s daughter greets them at the door, and behold, it is the girl who came to his room in the hotel.’
‘Go on. What happens next?’
‘It depends. Perhaps nothing more happens. Perhaps it is the kind of story that comes to a halt and doesn’t know where to go next.’
‘Nonsense. It depends on what?’
Now John speaks. ‘It depends on what passed between them in the hotel. Depends on the demands you say he made on her. In the story, Mother, do you spell out what demands he made?’
‘Yes, I do.’
Now they are silent, all of them. What the man in the city of X will do next, or the girl with the sideline in prostitution, recedes into insignificance. The real story is out on the balcony, where two middle-aged children face a mother whose capacity to disturb and dismay them is not yet exhausted. I am the one who cries.
‘Are you going to tell us what those demands were?’ asks Helen grimly, since there is nothing else to ask.
It is late but not too late. They are not children, none of them. For good or ill they are all together now in the same leaky boat called life, adrift without saving illusions in a sea of indifferent darkness (what metaphors she comes up with tonight!). Can they learn to live together in their boat without devouring one another?
‘Demands a man can make upon a woman that I would find shocking. But that you would perhaps not find shocking, coming from a different generation. Perhaps the world has sailed on in that respect and left me behind on the shore, deploring. Perhaps that is what turns out to be the nub of the story: that while the man, the senior man, blushes when he comes face to face with the girl, to the girl what happened in the hotel is just part of her trade, part of life, part of the way things are.’
The two children who are not children any more exchange glances. Is that all? they seem to be saying. Not much of a story.
‘The girl in the story is very beautiful,’ she says. ‘A veritable flower. I can reveal that. The man in question, Mr Jones, has never involved himself in something like this before, the humiliating of beauty, the bringing down of it. That was not his plan when he made the telephone call. He would not have guessed, when he made the telephone call, that he had it in him. It became his plan only when the girl herself appeared and he saw she was, as I say, a flower. It seemed an affront to him that all his life he should have missed it, real beauty, and would probably miss it from here onward too. A universe without justice! he would have cried inwardly, and proceeded from there in his bitter way. Not a nice man, on the whole, this Mr Jones.’
‘I thought, Mother,’ says Helen, ‘that you had doubts about beauty, about its importance. A sideshow, you called it.’
‘Did I?’
‘More or less.’
John reaches out and lays a hand on his sister’s arm. ‘The man in the story, Mr Jones,’ he says, ‘he still believes in beauty. He is under its spell. That is why he hates it and fights against it.’
‘Is that what you mean, Mother?’ says Helen.
‘I don’t know what I mean. The story is not written yet. Usually I resist the temptation to talk about stories before they are fully out of the bottle. Now I know why.’ Though the night is warm, she shivers lightly. ‘I experience too much interference.’
‘The bottle,’ says Helen.
‘Never mind.’
‘This is not interference,’ says Helen. ‘From other people it might be interference. But we are with you. Surely you know that.’
With you? What nonsense. Children are against their parents, not with them. But this a special evening in a special week. Very likely they will not come together again, all three of them, not in this life. Perhaps, this once, they should rise above themselves. Perhaps her daughter’s words come from the heart, the true heart, not the false one. We are with you. And her own impulse to embrace those words—perhaps it comes from the true heart too.
‘Then tell me what to say next,’ she says.
‘Embrace her,’ says Helen. ‘In front of her family let him take the girl in his arms and embrace her. No matter how odd it looks. “Forgive me for what I put you through,” let him say. Have him go down on his knees before her. “In you let me worship again the beauty of the world.” Or words to that effect.’
‘Very Irish Twilight,’ she murmurs. ‘Very Dostoevskian. I am not sure I have it in my repertoire.’
It is John’s last day in Nice. Early next morning he will set off to Dubrovnik for his conference, where they will be discussing, it seems, time before the beginning of time, time after the end of time.
‘Once upon a time I was just a boy who liked peering through a telescope,’ he says to her. ‘Now I have to refashion myself as a philosopher. As a theologian even. Quite a life-change.’
‘And what do you hope to see,’ she says, ‘when you look through your telescope into time before time?’
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘God perhaps, who has no dimensions. Hiding.’
‘Well, I wish I could see him too. But I do not seem to be able to. Say hello to him from me. Say I will be along one of these days.’
‘Mother!’
‘I’m sorry. As I am sure you know, Helen has proposed that I buy an apartment here. An interesting idea, but I do not think I will take it up. She says you have a proposal of your own to make. Quite heady, all these proposals. Like being courted again. What is it that you are proposing?’
‘That you come and stay with us in Baltimore. It is a big house, there is plenty of space, we are having another bathroom fitted. The children will love it. It will be good for them to have their grandmother around.’
‘They may love it while they are nine and six. They will not love it so much when they are fifteen and twelve and bring friends home and Grandma is shuffling around the kitchen in her slippers, mumbling to herself and clacking her dentures and perhaps not smelling too good. Thank you, John, but no.’
‘You do not have to make a decision now. The offer stands. It will always stand.’
‘John, I am in no position to preach, coming from an Australia that positively slavers to do its American master’s bidding. Nevertheless, bear it in mind that you are inviting me to leave the country where I was born to take up residence in the belly of the Great Satan, and that I might have reservations about doing so.’
He stops, this son of hers, and she stops beside him on the promenade. He seems to be pondering her words, applying to them the amalgam of pudding and jelly in his cranium, passed on to him as a birth gift forty years ago, whose cells are not tired, not yet, are still vigorous enough to grapple with ideas both big and small, time before time, time after time, and what to do with an aging parent.
‘Come anyway,’ he says, ‘despite your reservations. Agreed, these are not the best of times, but come anyway. In the spirit of paradox. And, if you will accept the smallest, the gentlest word of admonishment, be wary of grand pronouncements. America is not the Great Satan. Those men in the White House are just a blip in history. They will in due course make their exit, and all will be as it was before.’
‘So I may deplore but I must not denounce?’
‘Righteousness, Mother, that is what I am referring to, the tone and spirit of righteousness. I know it must be tempting, after a lifetime of weighing each word before writing it down, to just let go and be swept along in the torrent; but it leaves a bad taste in the mouth. You must be aware of that.’
‘The spirit of righteousness. So that is what it sounds like. I will bear it in mind. As for paradox, the first lesson of paradox, in my experience, is not to rely on paradox. If you rely on paradox, paradox will let you down.’
She takes his arm; in silence they resume their promenade. But all is not well between them. She can feel his stiffness, his irritation. A sulky child, she remembers. It all comes flooding back, the hours it would take to coax him out of one of his sulks. A gloomy boy, son of gloomy parents. How could she dream of taking shelter with him and that tight-lipped, disapproving wife of his!
At least, she thinks, they do not treat me like a fool. At least my children do me that honour.
‘Enough of quarreling,’ she says (is she coaxing now? is she pleading?). ‘Let us not make ourselves miserable talking about politics. Here we are on the shores of the Mediterranean, the cradle of Europe, on a balmy summer evening. Let me simply say, if you and Norma and the children can stand America no more, cannot stand the shame of it, the house in Melbourne is yours, as it has always been. You can come on a visit, you can come as refugees, you can come to réunir la famille, as Helen puts it. And now, what do you say we fetch Helen and stroll down to that little restaurant of hers on Boulevard Gambetta and have a nice meal together?’
2003–2007
HE finds it hard to accept that, to have this ordinary if necessary conversation with his mother, he must come all the way to where she resides in this benighted village on the Castilian plateau, where one is cold all the time, where for supper one is given a dish of beans and spinach, and where in addition one has to be polite about these half-wild cats of hers that scatter in all directions every time one enters the room. Why, in the evening of her life, can she not settle down in some civilized place? It was complicated getting here, it will be complicated getting back; even being here with her is more complicated than it need be. Why must everything his mother touches turn complicated?
The cats are everywhere, so many of them that they seem to split and multiply before his eyes like amoeba. There is also the unexplained man in the kitchen downstairs, sitting silent and bowed over his own bowl of beans. What is this stranger doing in his mother’s house?
He does not like beans, they are going to give him wind. To follow the diet of the nineteenth-century Spanish peasantry just because one is in Spain seems to him an affectation.
The cats, which have not yet been fed and will certainly not put up with beans, are all around his mother’s feet, writhing and preening themselves as they try to attract her attention. If it were his house he would smite them all out. But of course it is not his house, he is only a guest, he must comport himself politely, even towards the cats.
‘That’s a cheeky little rascal,’ he remarks, pointing—‘that one there, with the white mark on its face.’
‘Strictly speaking,’ says his mother, ‘cats don’t have faces.’
Cats don’t have faces. Has he made a fool of himself again?
‘I mean the one with the white patch around its eye,’ he corrects himself.
‘Birds don’t have faces,’ says his mother. ‘Fish don’t have faces. Why should cats? The only creatures with proper faces are human beings. Our faces are what prove us human.’
Of course. Now he sees. He has made a lexical slip. While human beings have feet, animals have paws; while human beings have noses, animals have snouts. But if only human beings have faces, then with what, through what, do animals face the world? Anterior features? Would a term like that satisfy his mother’s passion for exactitude?
‘A cat has a mien but not a face,’ says his mother. ‘A bodily mien. Even we, you and I, are not born with faces. A face has to be coaxed out of us, as a fire is coaxed out of coals. I coaxed a face out of you, out of your depths. I can remember how I bent over you and blew on you, day after day, till at last you, the being I called you my child, began to emerge. It was like calling forth a soul.’
She falls silent.
The kitten with the white blaze has become involved in a tussle with an older kitten over a strand of wool.
‘With or without a face,’ he says, ‘I like that one’s perkiness. Kittens promise so much. It’s a pity they so rarely deliver.’
His mother frowns. ‘What do you mean by deliver, John?’
‘I mean that they seem to promise to grow into individuals, individual cats, each with an individual character and an individual outlook on the world. But finally kittens just turn into cats, interchangeable, generic cats, representatives of their species. Centuries of associating with us don’t seem to have helped them. They don’t individuate. They don’t develop proper characters. At most they exhibit character types: the lazy, the petulant, and so forth.’
‘Animals don’t have characters in just the same way that they don’t have faces,’ says his mother. ‘You are disappointed because you expect too much.’
Though his mother is contradicting everything he says, he has no sense that she is hostile. She continues to be his mother, that is to say, the woman who bore him and then affectionately but abstractedly watched over him and protected him until he could find his own way in the world, and then forgot about him, more or less.
‘But if cats are not individuals, Mother, if they are not capable of being individuals, if they are simply one embodiment after another of the Platonic Cat, why keep so many of them? Why not keep just one?’
His mother ignores the question. ‘A cat has a soul but not a character,’ she says. ‘If you can grasp the distinction.’
‘You had better explain,’ he says. ‘In simple terms, for the benefit of this slow-witted outsider.’
His mother turns on him a smile that is positively sweet. ‘Animals don’t have faces, properly speaking, because they do not have the fine musculature around the eyes and mouth that we human beings are blessed with in order that our souls may manifest themselves. So their souls remain invisible.’
‘Invisible souls,’ he muses. ‘Invisible to whom, Mother? Invisible to us? Invisible to them? Invisible to God?’
‘About God I don’t know,’ she says. ‘If God is all-seeing, then all things must be visible to him. But invisible to you and me certainly. Invisible, strictly speaking, to other cats too: inaccessible to vision. Cats use other means to apprehend each other.’
Is this what he has travelled all these miles to hear: mystical nonsense about cat souls? And what of the man in the kitchen? When is his mother going to explain who he is? (This little house is not made for privacy, he can hear the man in the kitchen snuffling softly, like a pig, as he eats.)
‘Apprehend each other,’ he says: ‘what does that actually mean—smelling each other’s private parts, or something loftier? And’—he grows suddenly bolder—‘who is the man downstairs? Does he work for you?’
‘The man in the kitchen is named Pablo,’ his mother says. ‘I look after him. I protect him. Pablo was born in this village and has lived here all his life. He is shy, he doesn’t respond well to strangers, that is why I didn’t introduce you. Pablo went through a troubled period a while ago when he used to, as they say, expose himself. Expose himself habitually and without provocation. Not to me—after you have reached a certain age men no longer expose themselves to you—but to young women, and to children too.
‘Social Services wanted to take Pablo away and lock him up in what they called a place of safety. His family, that is to say his mother and his unmarried sister, did not resist, he had caused them enough trouble. It was then that I stepped in. I promised the Social Services people I would look after him if they let him stay. I promised to keep an eye on him, to make sure he doesn’t misbehave. Which is what I have done and go on doing. That is who is in the kitchen.’
‘So that is the reason why you won’t travel. Because you have to stay here to stand guard over the village exhibitionist.’
‘I keep an eye on Pablo and I keep an eye on the cats. The cats too have an uneasy relation with the village. Generations ago these were ordinary domestic cats. Then people from villages like this began to drift away to the cities, selling their livestock, abandoning the household cats to fend for themselves. Of course the cats went feral. They went back to nature. What other choice did they have? But those people who have stayed behind in the villages don’t like wild cats. They shoot them when they can, or else trap them and drown them.’
‘Abandoned by their domesticators, they reoccupied their wild souls,’ he offers.
The remark is intended flippantly, but his mother does not see the joke. ‘The soul does not have qualities, wild or tame or anything else,’ she says. ‘If the soul had qualities it would not be a soul.’
‘But you called it an invisible soul,’ he objects. ‘Isn’t invisibility a quality?’
‘There are no such things as invisible objects of perception,’ she replies. ‘Invisibility is not a quality of the object. It is a quality, a capacity or incapacity, of the observer. We call the soul invisible if we can’t see it. That says something about us. It says nothing about the soul.’
He shakes his head. ‘Where does it get you, Mother,’ he says, ‘sitting by yourself in this godforsaken village in the mountains of a foreign country, splitting scholastic hairs about subjects and objects, while wild cats, full of fleas and God knows what other vermin, skulk under the furniture? Is this really the life you want?’
‘I am preparing myself for the next move,’ she replies. ‘The last move.’ She looks him in the eye; she is calm; she seems to be entirely serious. ‘I am accustoming myself to living in the company of beings whose mode of being is unlike mine, more unlike mine than my human intellect will ever be able to grasp. Does that make sense to you?’
Does it make sense to him? Yes. No. He came here to talk about death, the prospect of death, his mother’s death and how to plan for it, but not about her afterlife.
‘No,’ he says, ‘it doesn’t make sense to me, not really.’ He dips a finger in the bean soup and stretches out his hand. The kitten with the white blaze pauses in its game, smells the finger cautiously, licks it. He looks the kitten in the eye, and for a moment the kitten looks back at him. Behind the eye, behind the black slit of the pupil, behind and beyond, what does he see? Is there a momentary flash, light glancing off the invisible soul hiding there? He cannot be sure. If there was indeed a flash, more likely than not it was his own reflection in the pupil.
