Life Embitters (39 page)

During those first weeks, when the weather was fine, what I liked best was
to cut the grass with a lawn mower. The grass was soft, green and wet and the voracious way that machine destroyed vegetable tissue sent a pleasant, morbid shiver through me.

It was very windy in that country. It never stopped gusting. Whichever direction it comes from, the wind in England always brings memories of the open sea: it is harsh, bitter, and salty. The wind tells you a lot about the place and I’m surprised travelers have mentioned it so little. It not only explains why the English are such good mariners, but also why they tend to be cautious and pensive, because the wind, when it has endured too many centuries, is so foolish that it forces you necessarily to think.

The place where I’m living is very peculiar. From the window at the back of the house one can see a bare and bulky hilltop that looks like the back of an elephant, on which a clump of very tall trees commemorates one of the decisive battles in the War of the Roses. I often stared at those ancient trees, but I never climbed that hill. I realized, by the small window, that I could lose one of my illusions there. I believe the War of the Roses is so lovely, is such a museum piece or subject for a commercial print, that it couldn’t withstand the slightest shockwave.

I decided to look the other way and Meanwood became the focus of my harmless and aimless wandering. With a little imagination one can easily see how Meanwood, despite its transformation into an industrial town, retains various relics of the England of old. It is still this country’s typical medieval parish; that is, the urban hub of the poor and small shops sheltering under the walls of a church surrounded by lordly mansions. The terrain likes to playfully scatter houses: it is an undulating landscape of streams, hills, and valleys, with lines of evergreen oaks dividing meadows – now converted into cricket and rugby fields – crisscrossed by all manner of paths, low walls,
and small dykes. Every old house has its own meadow for cows and sheep. The parish belongs to the Church of England, but there are two other places of worship, the Primitive Methodists and the Presbyterians. Each of these establishments has its rectory, its poor, and its Sunday Bible Schools. The church buildings, blackened by time, completely covered by ivy, nestling under ancient oaks, are simple in a rather cold, attractive way. The tavern-cum-hostelry,
The Golden Lion
, is worthy of respect: it maintains its stables, central courtyard, and trappings from the coaching era. All this, that is delightful enough on workdays, has to be set in the silence that ranges over the north of England on a Sunday, and better still on a foggy Sunday when the tranquility is a hundred times more stunning. You feel as if you are living in an unreal world, beset by a monotonous, muted hum, a weightless world, a wandering cloud, a fainting fit. The hours pass slowly and you doze off in front of the fire, without stress or desperate longings, marooned by your senses in an agreeable haze. When you hear the bells chime in the late afternoon, you feel you are returning from somewhere remote and find things have an intolerable, offensive presence. People are singing hymns in their homes with a strong nasal tone and that compact, solemn sound weighs so heavily in the air that the handful of fools who can’t give the tavern a miss end up chanting the church litanies.

However, all in all, what I liked most was to go and sit for an hour in the cemetery. On mid-week afternoons you felt a dreamlike solitude there. The fog swirled and wet your face. The tall, bare trees went in and out of the fog like walking shadows. In the haze at three o’clock I often saw the fuzzy glow from a house light. Sometimes a teasing, gentle drizzle kept you afloat mid-air, like a levitating body. The grass and mud together created a deep absinthe color. I have been in few places that so favored a blissful
state of suspension or contemplation as Meanwood’s inhospitable cemetery. It transported me elsewhere so easily and allowed me to make such slow-motion somersaults!

The weather then deteriorated so dreadfully I became quite averse to going out. I read several long stories, in particular the Bible that I hadn’t picked up in a long time. For a while I was delighted by the illusion that I had crystal-clear ideas about men and women, about the world and the objects in it. But human cruelty is, in effect, exhausting, because truth creates a situation from which there is no way out or future. That was when I decided to alternate reading with a disinterested contemplation of the outside world. I did it from my window. The local sparrows made a pleasant impression, though I soon realized that only one thing is worse than a sparrow and that is: another sparrow. These birds fight each other to the death and are insatiably voracious when vying with their peers. Nothing could be more disheartening than the sight of the effort a bird must make to quietly eat that crumb or meaty beetle it has won after huge travail or a battle with another sparrow. Because sparrows fight tooth and nail over a beetle, a crumb, or fresh air and alternate violence with the most joyfully rude lovemaking. I had no choice but to turn a blind eye and, in the end, desisted completely.

That was my stay in Meanwood, a suburb of Leeds. They were months when I didn’t see the sun – or long for the sun – immersed in a silence of rain, snow, and fog, darkened at times by winds and storms, charmed at others by tranquil chiming bells, far from the madding crowd and horrified to think that my return to it was inevitable. I had all I needed: a plate of roast beef and vegetables, a handful of random books, a drop of alcohol, and the
Manchester Guardian
. As I have roamed discretely, I am an expert when it comes to bidding farewell, but when it was time to depart that land of shadows I found it hard to keep back my tears.

To give you an idea of the atmosphere in Meanwood, in winter, and of signs that its atmosphere could become thicker and thicker, I will relate how one afternoon, when I was in the cemetery, that is, by the way, a place of transit, and had been sitting on a bench for some time, I suddenly noticed that a man was sitting next to me and staring at me, though nothing had alerted me to his presence. I almost shouted out in terror. He saw that and I heard him mutter enigmatically. Then he smiled drily, I reacted contemptuously and looked the other way. I retreated as ostentatiously and obviously as I could to the far end of the bench, increasingly intrigued by the man who’d sat down next to me without my realizing. My eyes were wide open, that’s for sure. Moreover, it wasn’t reading weather and I don’t remember anything nearby that might have distracted me to the extent that I didn’t see what was happening. It wasn’t too foggy either: it was merely blue and hazy. When I gave him another look, I was shocked by his strange appearance. He was a tall, thin man with sunken cheeks, though his complexion was certainly fresh, his cheeks smoothly shaven, and below that his bushy beard curled up under a skull as small as a bird’s, covered with blondish hair and a bald patch above the nape of his neck. I could see all that because he wasn’t wearing a hat or a cap even though the weather was so miserable. His ears were on the large side and his nose was a big schnozzle. Thick, misty glasses rested on this protuberance, from behind which two bright eyes squinted out. He was smoking a cigarette and when he exhaled he exercised every single jaw muscle and his beard almost touched the end of his nose. Despite his eccentric appearance, it was impossible not to see that his face looked bemused, as if his curiosity had been slightly aroused. I wasn’t able to look at him for long, because the second he’d finished his smoke he stood up, straightened his glasses on his nose by stretching, and then shortening his arms and flounced slowly away rather effeminately, moving his back as if he
had an attack of the shivers. As he got to his feet, I glimpsed the way he was dressed and was more astonished than ever: he wore a winged collar and white bow tie, a much-darned, red-polka-dotted shirt, and the turn-ups of baggy black pants hung out beneath his shabby white raincoat. His lower extremities were encased in split, mud-spattered shoes.

But perhaps the fact I couldn’t guess his age was most intrigued me about that fantastic individual: you could have taken him for an old man who’d been artificially rejuvenated or for a decrepit youth and he could have easily been one or the other. I wondered if he might not be a professional simpleton. True enough, one finds real simpletons in English cities, but they exist outside as well. When walking through fields, you sometimes come across strange people who seem to be sleepwalking and look as if they don’t belong to this world. Whatever the weather you can watch them stroll slowly by, in a trance as if something mysterious had surprised them, or they were being forced to follow the path of a wandering cloud. I’d like to think that these eccentric characters were some sort of actor in the drama of that swirling haze, a kind of pilgrim intoxicated by the vast void of fog. Generally speaking, however, they are contemplative folk with notorious reputations or harmless fools and, they do say, you can even find the odd sarcastic comedian in their ranks.

I can’t find the words to describe how strange I felt when that very same afternoon when I was opening the front door, I saw the man I had encountered in the cemetery leaving a neighboring house. I even thought that he smiled at me from a distance making an
o
with his open mouth and stiffening his thin, rubbery lips. I couldn’t wait to mention the fact to the lady of the house, who rattled off a long explanation that unfortunately I can’t reproduce here in as much detail as I’d like.

“The house next door,” she told me, “stood empty for months and you
can imagine how surprised we were when we saw tenants arriving. The new tenants were this gentleman who has aroused your curiosity and a very old lady, who, they say, is almost eighty. This lady is the widow of a former dance teacher who ran an academy in London up to a few months before his death that occurred twenty-five years ago. Her husband left her a small sum and she has eked out a wretched existence on that up to now. According to what people say, she’s an extraordinary individual: despite her age and though she’s been bedridden for three years, she maintains all her faculties as if she was a young girl, remembers everything and converses fluently. Besides that, she has a huge appetite and eats plenty of everything. Between you and me, her stomach often crops up in conversations when the latter turn to the subject of stomachs. To be perfectly frank, the household has few friends: both of them are Irish Papists and that leaves them rather isolated. We don’t have anything to do with them, but not for those reasons. We’ve decided that the best way to keep on friendly terms with one’s neighbors is to let them be, and that’s why there’s been hardly contact between them and us. He is Thomas O’Grady, and we call him Mr Tom. Tom is the old lady’s servant and he runs the house all on his tod: cooking, washing, dusting, and pastry-making, he does the shopping, waits on the lady, bathes her, irons, mends and patches. In a word, he does all that’s to be done if a home is to be called a home. I’ve heard that he’s polite and serious even though he does have his fads, In the early days after they moved in everyone stared at him as if he was peculiar and children laughed in his face. He’s the sad kind. He’s got a nasty, girlish voice. When he speaks, he gestures with his hands and makes pretentious, effeminate faces. He’s the kind that grabs things with his fingertips while rolling his eyes. He’s mad about music and one of these days you’ll hear him croon some Italian ballad with that nasal voice of his. Pathetic and silly … I’ve heard he’s from a good Irish family, but is one who
was born to be unhappy. He is a watchmaker by profession; by the time he’d served his apprenticeship, he’d become myopic and couldn’t work at it. He’s lived any old how in different parts of England and perhaps he can only do what he is actually doing. Nonetheless if he wasn’t Irish or so queer, he would find work as a servant in a good household. Now everyone shuts their door in his face and the old dear gives him four shillings a week. He must be in his thirties. He’s a pitiful fellow.”

I must confess that really depressed me. I’d thought for a moment that I’d found an interesting character for the novel I’ve got in mind and it turns out that Mr Tom is a nobody and riffraff to boot. But there you go, a few weeks after all that we bumped into each other by chance in Meanwood’s bookshop. The second he saw me, he waved his arm in the same way a goose stretches its neck, while bowing formally – his head was bare as it was on the first day we met. The bookseller did all she could to stifle her chuckles. When he’d finished bowing, he asked for permission to introduce himself in a fluty voice that made my flesh creep. I was horrified by the man’s bizarre appearance, I took two steps backward but was too late to make my escape: he’d grabbed my hand and started to speak so obsequiously that I began to wonder if he wasn’t some sinister confidence trickster. I could feel the icy touch of his hands. I thought the best thing was to leave and that’s what we finally did.

“I hear you’re from a country that’s been Catholic for thousands of years, is that right?” he asked affectedly as I shut the bookshop door.

“That’s absolutely right. Do you find that of interest?”

“Very much so …” he replied, as his little finger imitated the goose’s neck movement that he could do with his arm and rolled his eyes. “There aren’t many of us who think like that in Meanwood!”

“Indeed, we are an insignificant minority …”

“Meanwood is such a vulgar little town! There’s no social life of any description. Ireland is very different …”

“Do you find social life to be of interest?”

“It’s what most interests me. I come from a good family and was well brought up. Then things went sour on me, to be sure. In Liverpool I was always invited to the best households who shared our beliefs. I know a hundred games and society habits that are highly entertaining. Come to our house one day and I think you’ll like them. But don’t imagine they’re anything out of the ordinary. You will know others … What do you do on a Saturday afternoon?”