Dreams of Speaking (4 page)

She had met Stephen at university, when they were both in their second year of study. He had long hair, which fell diagonally across his face, and an inward, secluded attitude that challenged women to break through. Unaware of his attractiveness, he was doubly desirable. When they first spoke she detected in his voice a gravelly tone, a kind of old-man timbre inconsistent with his youth. He was studying philosophy – which somehow fitted his incommensurate voice. She was studying literature.

They fell into bed together almost immediately, with a sense of enormous relief and easy companionship. Sexual relationships at university have an unprecedented and never-to-be-recovered-again liberty, unencumbered, mutually explorative, ideologically confirmed. In the energy of their congress, they thought themselves heroic. Afterwards, they would lie sideways on the bed, their heads tilted backwards, smoking joints, exchanging facile aphorisms about the meaning of life, kissing and giggling and wasting time. It was always afternoon. There were always specks and particles in the air, imperishable, resonant, blazing up with the unseen vitality they now detected in every thing.

Alice remembers this: once, after they had made love, Stephen began suddenly to weep. She stroked his cheek and murmured consolation, but her lover remained obdurately unconsoled. He had been in love, at fourteen, with a girl who
was hit by a car. She was only twelve. They said she had died instantly. In his home town on the south coast, in a former whaling community, this girl had become an emblem of loss. Everyone remembered her. Everyone mourned. She became more cherished, he said, as the years went by. She became their symbol. There was a park named after her, a park of straggly pink rosebushes, blown to smithereens by the fierce sea wind.

Alice lay back, looking at the ceiling. She was learning that every life has its secret collisions, that in even the most self-possessed of men, there are also these vacancies and lamentations. Alice rolled onto Stephen's body, stretching out to encompass him, so that their limbs matched part to part, like a photocopy. She kissed his tearful eyes, and knew for the first time that in every intimacy there are these spirit presences, which rise up, revenant, even in lovemaking. She had wanted to say to Stephen that she understood his grief, but in those days she did not.

‘What was her name?' she asked. ‘This twelve-year-old girl.'

‘Her name was Alice,' said Stephen, in a low rough voice.

When she arrived at the studio Alice found that it was no more than an ascetic box. There was a single bed, a table and two upright chairs; there was a modest kitchen to one side, in which nestled a toy-sized refrigerator and a small gas burner with two rings. She tapped the red gas bottle, which resembled an aqualung, and realised that she had no idea how to gauge its fullness. From the first floor, the studio faced onto a narrow street, and from the window Alice could see a secondary school, disgorging its pupils for a noisy break. They hung around flirting and smoking; their voices rose in dispersing syllables.

This is perfect, Alice thought, perfect for writing.

She liked the sense of a clarified existence, in which few possessions, few objects, claimed narrative attention. The air was cold. Everything was still. In a cupboard Alice found coffee, long-life milk and a bag of sugar. She brewed coffee over the gas in a battered saucepan. Her body was strung out, in another time zone, still operating in the reverse logic of a cross-planetary biology, but she felt alert, excited. Travel, rush through space, was her self-enchantment. Relocation into new co-ordinates. Forfeited certainties. The erotics of strangeness. She couldn't bear the persistence of the known into stale habituation. Alice sat in semi-darkness, sipping from her cup.

A few streets away drifted the venerable, khaki-coloured Seine, older than Europe.

There was no telephone, no television, no labour-saving appliance. This was where she would imagine, with the exactitude of deprivation, all those glistening tokens of modernity, those industrial culminations, that called out to be described, that were so omnipresent as to have lost their aura, and their originary dynamic and aesthetic charge. She made a list of categories:

electrics, mechanics, communication, transportation

Then:

spiritualisation, secularisation, sexualisation

And:

gigantism, miniaturisation, division, replication

vision, sensation, cognition, precognition

tragic, comic, nostalgic, melodramatic

With this slightest of codes, arbitrarily jotted, Alice would begin to elaborate her poetics of modernity. Sometimes she would research at the Bibliothèque Nationale; sometimes she would write as poets do, with the spontaneous embrace of a seductive metaphor, with the grace and intuition of
selected images, with chance, with blind luck, with errancy and confidence.

Outside there was a sudden crackle of adolescent laughter. It hung in the freezing air, sharp and lucent as icicles.

Television is, after all, a box of wonders.

Into its limited cube fly unlimited images; into its receptive channels, with incredible celerity, rush crazy narratives, world events, men and women of unnaturally glossy good looks, historical re-enactments, capitalist extravaganzas, politicians, and singers, and sports heroes by the dozen. In flashy mode it links the grotesque and the mosaic, a combination that allows for hyperbole in all things and the endless, restless fracturing of vision. Viewers, of whom there are billions, are inspired to fanatical devotion or delicious lassitude. The crystal eye finds every sight and pretends to tell every story. There was never a medium so omniscient in its sheer ambition.

The hand-held ‘remote' is aptly named. One does not need to touch the television to make it work. From the bed, from the sofa, it is called into action: switching channels is a consequence of the merest pressure, and what opens are sequences, territories, styles, talking heads. Zapped into visibility, for just an instant, every image looks more or less insane. Commercials, especially, carry a lunatic fringe, an appeal to the unhinged you that would dramatise pasta or shampoo, the you that wants to parachute from an aeroplane, or fears the germs in the laundry, or fantasises about solitary travel in protuberant, sexual cars. Humankind cannot bear too much remote incomprehension.

By the light of the television – a spooky indigo glow – one can see mortality itself dance on the faces of entire families.
They look arrested, dumb. Death is already claiming them. Flicker is the mode of televisual morbidity.

In the middle of the night Alice heard the river for the first time. It met her with a rhythmic, thunderous sound, the sound of volumes of water hurling forward in a muscular curl. When Alice stirred a little, sitting up in the lonely darkness, she realised that the sound was in fact of traffic: a two-way vibrating hum, relentless and inorganic as a Xerox machine. Perhaps it was the
idea
of the river that seemed somehow audible. The distant mystery of nature, persisting in spite of everything. Energies beyond machines. Beyond petrochemical drive.

In a toy shop on the Île, Alice found wooden objects of touching simplicity to send to her niece and nephew. They were a pierrot doll with articulated limbs, and a carved oak cat with painted-on eyes. She was not sure which toy she would give to which child. Old-fashioned toyshops aroused in her uncomplicated jubilation. She always entered them, and she always bought something. Behind the counter there was invariably a bespectacled shopkeeper who liked to chat about the virtues of wood. Alice tilted the pierrot at its waist, declaring it lifelike. She thought of her sister, as a six-year-old, bathing a doll. At this moment the past rushed forward like a gust: these anomalous material signs hailed her back, inserted her again into miniature fantasies and the playful animation of wood.

Stephen was early. He sat outside the café in the cold, awaiting her arrival. Alice kissed both cheeks and asked if they could move inside, out of the wind. The glass window of the café returned them as a couple.

‘
Anglais?
' asked the waiter, with a perceptible sneer.

‘
Australienne,
' Alice replied.

The waiter's attitude changed in an instant. He smiled beneficently. ‘
Ah! Le kangourou! L'Opéra! L'Aborigène!
'

Stephen looked at the man with withering disparagement, but Alice smiled, and tossed back her head.

‘
C'est vrai,
' she said. ‘
Le kangourou
.'

‘Jesus,' Stephen muttered under his breath. ‘Do you have to assent and proclaim the stereotype?'

He was ill-tempered. Out of sorts. Alice noticed that he looked as if he hadn't slept.

‘It's innocent,' said Alice. ‘It's an innocent aesthetic.'

‘It's crude. It's a reduction.
L'Aborigène
, what was he thinking?'

They ordered coffee and Stephen subsided into silence. He played with pyramids of sugar; he tore at his paper serviette. Then he barked: ‘Why are you here, anyway?' He sounded petulant.