Chapter
Fifteen
'Backwards and
downwards,' the laughter and the cigar. For long durations
there was nothing else. This was all of
himself that he possessed, all of himself that he had
been able to find. Nothing
but the memory of three words, of a sudden glory and a slobbered cylinder of
tobacco. But it sufficed. The knowledge was delightful and reassuring.
Meanwhile,
on the fringes of awareness, the light still lingered; and suddenly, between
two rememberings, he perceived that it had somehow
changed.
In
the beginning the brightness had been everywhere, and
everywhere the same, a shining silence, boundless and uniform. And essentially it was still without flaw,
still indeterminate. And yet, while it
remained what it had always been, it was as though that calm boundlessness of
bliss and knowledge had been limited by the interpenetration of an
activity. An activity that was at the
same time a pattern, a kind of living lattice; ubiquitous, infinitely complex,
exquisitely delicate. A
vast ubiquitous web of beknottednesses and
divergences, of parallels and spirals, of intricate figures and their curiously
distorted projections - all shining and active and alive.
Once
more his single fragment of selfhood came back to him - the same as ever, but
in some way associated, this time, with a particular figure in that bright
lattice of intricate relationships, located, as it were, on one of its
innumerable nodes of intersecting movement.
'Backwards
and downwards,' and then suddenly glory of laughter.
But
this pattern of intersections was projected from another pattern, and within
that other pattern he suddenly found another, larger fragment of himself -
found the remembered image of a small boy, scrambling up out of the water of a
ditch, wet and muddy to above the knees.
And 'Sucks, John, sucks!' he remembered himself shouting; and when the
boy said, 'Jump, you coward,' he only shouted, 'Sucks!' again, and howled with
laughter.
And
the laughter brought back the cigar, all slobbered, and along with the cigar,
somewhere else in the heart of that ubiquitous lattice, the memory of the
feeling of a thumb between the lips, the memory of the pleasure of sitting
interminably in the w.c., reading the Boy's Own
Paper and sucking on a stringy length of liquorice.
And
here, going back from projection to projector, was the
image of an enormous, firm-fleshed presence, smelling of disinfectant
soap. And when he failed to do Töpchen, Fräulein Anna
laid him deliberately across her knees, gave him two smacks, and left him
laying face downwards on the cot, while she went to fetch the Spritze. Yes,
the Spritze, the Spritze....
And there were other names for it, English names; for sometimes it was his
mother who inflicted the pleasure-anguish of the enema. And when that happened the looming presence
smelt, not of disinfectant, but of orris root. And though, of course, he could have done
Töpchen if he had wanted to, he wouldn't - just
for the sake of that agonizing pleasure.
The
lines of living light fanned out, then came together
in another knot; and this was no longer Fräulein Anna
or his mother; this was Mimi. Spicciati, Bebino! And with an uprush
of elation he remembered the claret-coloured dressing-gown, the warmth and
resilience of flesh beneath the silk.
Through
the interstices of the lattice he was aware of the other aspect of the light -
of the vast undifferentiated silence, of the beauty austerely pure, but
fascinating, desirable, irresistibly attractive.
The
brightness approached, grew more intense.
He became part of the bliss, became identical with the silence and the
beauty. For ever, for
ever.
But
with participation in the beauty there went participation in the
knowledge. And suddenly he knew these
recovered fragments of himself for what they so shamefully were; knew them for
mere clots and disintegrations, for mere absences of light, mere untransparent privations, nothingnesses
that had to be annihilated, had to be held up into the incandescence,
considered in all their hideousness by the light of that shining silence,
considered and understood and then repudiated, annihilated to make place for
the beauty, the knowledge, the bliss.
The
claret-coloured dressing-gown fell apart, and he discovered another fragment of
his being - a memory of round breasts, wax-white, tipped with a pair of blind
brown eyes. And in the thick flesh,
deeply embedded, the navel, he recalled, had the absurd primness of a Victorian
mouth. Prunes and
prisms. Adesso commincia la totura.
Abruptly,
almost violently, the beauty of the light and the anguish of participating in
its knowledge were intensified beyond the limits of possibility. But in the same instant he realized that it
was in his power to avert his attention, to refuse to participate. Deliberately, he limited his awareness to the
claret-coloured dressing-gown. The light
died down again into insignificance. He
was left in peace with his little property of memories and images. To treasure and enjoy them
interminably - to enjoy them to the point of identification, to the point of
being transubstantiated into them.
Again and again, through comfortable durations of cigars and
dressing-gowns and laughter and Fräulein Anna, and
then cigars again and dressing-gowns....
Then
suddenly, within the framework of the lattice, there was an abrupt displacement
of awareness, and he was discovering another fragment of himself.... They were
sitting in that church at Nice, and the choir was singing Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus - the men's voices filling all the hollow
darkness with a passion of grief and yearning, and the boyish trebles passing
back and forth between them, harmonious but beautifully irrelevant with the
virginal otherness of things before the Fall, before the discovery of good and
evil. Effortlessly, the music moved on
from loveliness to loveliness. There was
the knowledge of perfection, ecstatically blissful and at the same time sad,
sad to the point of despair. Ave Verum, Verum Corpus. Before the motet was half over, the tears
were streaming down his cheeks. And when
he and Laurina left the church, the sun had set, and
above the dark housetops the sky was luminous and serene. They found the car and drove back to
And
now he was at another but an almost identical intersection of the lattice,
remembering himself lying in the long grass beside the cricket field at
school. Looking up
sleepily, through half-closed eyelids, at the hazy, almost tangible blueness of
an English summer afternoon. And
as he looked, something extraordinary happened.
Nothing moved, but it was though there had been an enormous circular
gesture, as though something like a curtain had been drawn back. To all outward seeming that blue nostalgic
canopy just above the treetops remained unruffled. And yet everything was suddenly different,
everything had fallen to bits. The
friendliness of familiar things and happenings - all were in bits. Shattered, for all that they were physically
intact, by an inward and invisible earthquake.
Something had broken through the crust of customary appearance. A lava gush from some
other, more real order of existence.
Nothing had changed; but he perceived everything as totally different,
perceived himself as capable of acting and thinking in
totally new ways appropriate to that revolutionary difference in the world.
'What
about going down town when the game's over?'
He
looked up. It was Timmy Williams - but
even Timmy Williams, he suddenly perceived, was something other, better, more
significant than the ferret-faced creature he enjoyed talking literature and
smut with.
'Something
rather queer happened to me this afternoon,' he was confiding, half an hour
later, as they sat at the confectioner's, eating strawberries and cream.
But
when the story was told Timmy merely laughed and said that everybody had spots
in front of their eyes sometimes. It was
probably constipation.
It
wasn't true, of course. But now that the
shattered world had come together again, now that the curtain had fallen into
place and the lava gush had flowed back to where it had come from, how nice and
comfortable everything was! Better to
leave well enough alone. Better to go on
behaving as one had always behaved, not risk having to do anything strange, or
uncomfortable. After a moment's
hesitation, he joined in the laughter.
Probably constipation.
Yes, probably constipation. And,
as though endowed with a life of its own, the refrain
began to chant itself to the tune of 'Under the Bamboo Tree'.
Probably
constip,
Probably
constip,
Probably
constipaysh;
Probably
const,
Probably
const,
Probably
constipay, pay, pay.
And da
capo, da capo - like that barrel organ which was
playing the tune outside the Kensington Registry Office the morning he and Amy
were married.
Under
the bamboo,
Under
the bamboo,
Probably
constipays
...