Art & Lies (15 page)

The woman on the white slab, the woman on the frosted ground. The woman who trusted him with her breasts, who took his long fingers and put them on her breasts, eight cool knives on her warm breasts. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

‘Stop apologising Handel, you don’t have to make love to me.’

Under general anaesthetic the patient can hear everything.

The man on the train had fainted. The light struck his cheeks but did not revive him. He heard voices from afar off, calling, calling through the thick air …

‘When you grow up Handel, you must do some good in the world.’

‘Sins of the flesh or sins of conscience?’

‘Did you ejaculate into this woman?’

‘You don’t have to make love to me.’

The voices bound his hands and feet in golden bandages. He was mummified in the dead air, he must breathe, he must breathe but the cloths were at his nostrils and soaked in honey. Honeyed words, hadn’t he said them? The rational man with the musical voice, ‘There’s nothing to worry about. Nothing to fear, go on, get dressed.’

His flesh, naked before her mirror, the boys waiting to be gelded in the stalls.

Someone else’s flesh, naked before him, the taut brown nipple under the whorl of his finger.

The light in railings around his body. He couldn’t slip between. The light had staked him out. He must answer, not with gilded lips now, but tongues of flame.

SAPPHO

T
HE DOLL
was a woman of fortune. Fortune in her dress, Fortune on the gilded wheels of her coach, Fortune in the hangings, drapes, pots and porcelain from inside the Everlasting Wall. Her china came through Holland, in the private barrels of a lover who was Imperial. Thus she had what the King of England had not; porcelain. But tonight, in the brumous winter and the charcoal streets, it was not the tiny bowls and tea dishes for which she silently blessed her yellow wag. As a token of love, half in earnest, half in jest, he had given her an occult piece, exquisite, transparent, strong, decorated with lewd lovers in blue relief. It was this she wore on its leather strap and it comforted her. Any straying hand would find its expectancy. She shifted it slightly as she swung into The Cock and Gun.

(Sappho wrote in the margin of the page: ‘Where can I get one of these?’)

The strawed floor. The gouged benches. The smoke fire roasting the pig. Where was Ruggiero?

A boy had a sailor beautifully unbuttoned, and to her surprise, the Doll felt her porcelain swell, she took hold of it. A man smiled at her and gestured to the Backs. She shook her head. Where was Ruggiero? She pushed between a pair of petticoats, unloosed from both hips, had she seen …? Had she seen? When she got to the fire, the man with the tongs on his lover’s nipples, was not her love. She had been mistaken. Where was Ruggiero? She stood back and pondered the Chase. Why such a rush to the hills when any man could enjoy any valley he fancied?

She drank. She waited. She was hungry but she could not eat. The men playing Piss the Fire had pissed the pig. He steamed in ammonia clouds.

She sighed. She waited. All for love? Where was Ruggiero? Hadn’t she had them raw from the womb? Hadn’t she taught her strapling boys to put in their hands after honeycomb? Hadn’t she taken them in their gowns and mortar boards and coaxed them to put aside the set square for the pleasure of the compass? She had shown them how to take a point and expand a circle around it. She had been a proper Columbus to their undiscovered coasts. She had mapped them, schooled savages, no matter how simple the tool. They were logged up in her little book under their individual coordinates. She liked to remember a man by his dimensions. Not only the length, but also the width, and distance travelled. She had been a charitable and an accommodating Doll. Scientific, certainly, and rational in all her pursuits, but with that love of music and verse that she felt Newton lacked. He used to come to her, when she had first advertised her credentials, and he often brought an apple which he never ate. He said it had fallen on his head, and he gazed at it with all the wonder of a soothsayer into a globe. Poor man, very often she distracted him, but it was to the apple he returned.

He had said ‘This fell on my head. Why?’

‘Codling moth,’ said the Doll.

She was still fond of him. She was fond in her work, but in love? Never Never Never. Yet, she liked men, foolish, boyish, trumpeting men. What was it her friend Jack Cut the butcher had said? ‘A pig and a man, both must have loins.’

A Swank dropped down beside her and offered her a trotter. It was not a trotter she wanted …

Time passed. Let Time pass, she would not detain him, he had too much detained her. She was twice Ruggiero’s age. Time had passed and taken her with him in his train.

Lost in the dial of the clock, she did not see the tall, square-shouldered woman, gay companion on her arm. They stood by the door, the woman, a little nervous, fluttering her eyes at the men. It was a sense that she was being watched, that made the Doll look up from her cups, she looked up. She knew the straight nose that made an Emperor of his face. She knew the clean lines of porphyry, his pale skin, purple at the temple veins. She knew the twist of his arm and his agitated fingers. She knew his upright back and the plumbline of his spine. She knew, though she had never known, the delicious pound weight of his whiter meat.

There was jelly on her lips from the trotter.

She stood up and walked over to the woman, who blushed, and bowed a little behind her fan.

‘Let her hide behind all the fans of the Orient,’ thought the Doll, whose own bright head had begun to rise in the East …

She gave her arm to Ruggiero and accompanied her to a dark seat, where she pulled out from her lower pocket that bound volume,
The Poetical Works of Sappho.

The Wise Sappho? Am I wise to love the image and not the idol?

Open the book. What does it say?

The Greeks, with their quick artistic instinct, set in the bride’s chamber, the statue of Hermes or Apollo, that she might bear children as lovely as the works of art she looked upon in her rapture or her pain. They knew that life gains from art not only spirituality, depth of thought and feeling, soul-turmoil or soul-peace, but that she can form herself on the very lines and colours of art, and can reproduce the dignity of Pheidias as well as the grace of Praxiteles. Hence came their objection to realism. They disliked it on purely social grounds. They felt that it inevitably makes people ugly and they were perfectly right.

The image not the idol. The image stamped upon the retina, repeated behind the eyelid, stored in the rhomencephalon, returned to the body in injections of emotion. The power of the image through the unforgetting brain.

Did I see you, Sophia, on a ledge in the night? White winged in waves of beauty that closed over my head? Equinoctial waves that box at the moon. The sea in the harbour ring and the moon on the ropes of the boats.

Did I see you again or do I suffer from retina pigmentosa? I saw your colours in prismatic white, a see-through angel in unfitting clothes.

What did I see when I looked at you? An arrangement of molecules affected by light? A vision of my own? A vision of you? You as you really are, unaffected by darkness, stripped out of the net that captived you. Gladiators and spiders both use nets, but neither say for safety’s sake. Who lied to you and bound you? Who called their meshes your own good? Retiary malice of the unfree to the flying?

It was a long time ago. I caught her as she fell in whirling wheels of pain. Caught the body weighed down by sorrow. She fell out of the past through an insubstantial present and into the future of her love. Her love, which like charity, does not begin at home.

This is what happened: It was Christmas morning, three years ago, Christmas of deep snow stacked in high banks. I had been with friends but left them in warm revels to make myself an icy fugitive in the streets below. I was alone but for the thin dog that rootled for a bone. Alone but for the alley cat black on the glassy wall. Alone among the frost-cast stars.

Was I alone? I looked up in time to see her drop from the still roof into the moving air. Naked, without sound, through the silent air. I ran to where she fell and found her, higher than my head, unconscious on a white altar still soft with late snow. She was bleeding from the mouth.

I covered her with my coat and tried to get an answer from the dark house doors barred. How many years passed before a light filled up the passage and an angry voice threatened me with the police?

There were police. Raucous squad cars that slewed round her body in an obscene circle, doors open, flashing lights, the staccato of the radio cutting through the family tears. The ambulance, white, sterile, certain. The grim men on Christmas duty, one at either end of the fragile stretcher. Blankets over her now. Her body, a faint bundle of red blankets, red to hide the blood and the corkscrew of her leg.

I slipped away, but not before I held her hands, not before I kissed her. I said ‘I will come back.’ I said ‘Open your eyes, won’t you open your eyes?’ and all this I said and did in the terrible minutes while the family ran up and down the long hall calling the police.

I thought that she would die. I put my cheek to her lips and felt no breath. I kissed her with the life of me, life to life, warmth enough to lift her hand from the cold gates slowly opening on to her last estate. I said ‘I will come back.’

I did go back but she had gone. The house was dark and shuttered. I did go back, not once, but many times, to the blank walls and shielded doors. Nothing to guide me but a scrap of paper from out of her hand. ‘That which is only living can only die.’

She had not died. Strange miracle that saved her. Miracle of the soft snow that broke her fall. Miracle of the cold snow that staunched the blood. The disinterested weather and my fervent hands. An accident of the season and a passer-by. Happy coincidences? Ordinary miracles? It doesn’t matter, what matters is her life. Her life, that was more to her than flesh and blood, more to her than a killing doll, could not evaporate in the night air. She had a spirit and it lived. I did not know what it was that drove her to the roof and flung her off it. I know from my own experience that suicide is not what it seems. Too easy to try to piece together the fragmented life. The spirit torn in bits so that the body follows. The fissures and the hollows of the heart do not respond to rational measurement. When the instruments fail the doctor blames the patient. He says he can find nothing wrong.

The doctor said he could find nothing wrong. She was healthy, she had work, she came from a good family. Her heart beat was normal. Was it? Well, perhaps a little too fast.

Heart attack. Had her heart attacked her? Her heart, trained at obedience classes from an early age? Her heart, well muzzled in public, taught to trot in line. Her heart, that knew the Ten Commandments, and obeyed a hundred more. Her disciplined dogged heart that would come when it was called and that never strained its leash. Her heart, that secretly gnawed away its body’s bones. Her heart, that too long kept famished now consumed her. Her heart turned.

I saw her heart turning over and over through the somersaulted air.

I saw her heart ignore its bounds and leap.

It was her heart I pounded with both hands, my knees across her, my mouth that shouted ‘Live! Live!’

She opened her eyes. She did live. Consciousness returning to the accelerated body. Her body, that in the spinning seconds had resolved to finish its work. Her body, that had travelled through gravity, through light, its own mission of inner space. Its suit too flimsy for the years that pressed upon it in the seconds left. Common for people to see their past flash before them, the images stored in the unforgetting brain. Common for them to find that, as every material thing is slipping away, it is the image that prevails, the image that was victorious after all. Those pictures and impressions long since cut away from their source, but here still, as lively as ever, liveliness of spirit against the dying life.

She saw her past compressed into a single stroke of colour and it was the colour that made a bridge for her, not out of time, but through it. She did not drop, she crossed herself, and in the moment of crossing herself she was freed.

Free. Free from the outcrop where she had been marooned. The rocky place of thistle and salt. The heart beat back so many times that it finds its only home in isolation. The isolated heart, that in protecting itself from pain, loses so much of beauty and buys its survival at the cost of its life.

Better to go forward than to retreat. Better to fight the hurt than to flee from it. She did not know this until the quick second of her fall and as she fell she prayed for wings. She prayed not out of self-pity nor regret, but out of recognition. She need not die. She could fight. Too late? No. Not for her. For her it was not too late.

Many times I returned, but it was on this one night, years later, that what was lost was found.

I like to walk at night, it is my habit, I walk at night to rid myself of too much day. Too much daylight that pretends to show up things as they really are. No such thing as natural light.

Crossing by that house again, now threatened by a crane, I looked up to where the parapet met the plane trees. She was there. There on the ledge, there in bare feet, balanced on herself. I should have been afraid because history always repeats itself. The past fitted in a new wedding shroud and married to the future. I should have been afraid, waved my arms and shouted, not stood in quiet wonder at her grace. I knew she would not fall. I knew she had a different reason for her risk. I knew that she had seen me although I could not see her face.

Lie beside me. Let me see the division of your pores. Let me see the web of scars made by your family’s claws and you their furniture. Let me see the wounds that they denied. The battleground of family life that has been your body. Let me see the bruised red lines that signal their encampment. Let me see the routed place where they are gone. Lie beside me and let the seeing be the healing. No need to hide. No need for either darkness or light. Let me see you as you are.