Nightwood (15 page)

'I've got to write to her,' Nora said. 'I've got to.'

'No man knows it as I know it, I who am the god of darkness. Very well, but know the worst, then. What of Felix and his son Guido, that sick lamenting, fevered child? Death in the weather is a tonic to him. Like all the new young his sole provision for old age is hope of an early death. What spirits answer him who will never come to man's estate? The poor shattered eagerness. So, I say, was Robin purposely unspun? Was Jenny a sitting bitch for fun? Who knows what knives hash her apart? Can't you rest now, lay down the pen? Oh,
papelero
, have I not summed up my time! I shall rest myself some day by the brim of Saxon-les-Bains and drink it dry, or go to pieces in Hamburg at the gambling table, or end up like Madame de Staël—with an affinity for Germany. To all kinds of ends I'll come. Ah yes, with a crupper of maiden's hair to keep my soul in place, and in my vanguard a dove especially feathered to keep to my wind, as I ride that grim horse with ample glue in every hoof to post up my deeds when I'm dropped in and sealed with earth. In time everything is possible and in space everything forgivable; life is but the intermediary vice. There is eternity to blush in. Life laid end to end is what brings on flux in the clergy—can't you rest now, put down the pen? Oh, the poor worms that never arrive! Some strangely connived angel pray for us! We shall not encompass it—the defunctive murmur in the cardiac nerve has given us all our gait. And Robin? I know where your mind is! She, the eternal momentary—Robin who was always the second person singular. Well,' he said with violence, 'lie weeping with a sword in your hand! Haven't I eaten a book too? Like the angels and prophets? And wasn't it a bitter book to eat? The archives of my case against the law, snatched up and out of the tale-telling files by my high important friend. And didn't I eat a page and tear a page and stamp on others and flay some and toss some into the toilet for relief's sake—then think of Jenny without a comma to eat, and Robin with nothing but a pet name—your pet name to sustain her; for pet names are a guard against loss, like primitive music. But does that sum her up? Is even the end of us an account? No, don't answer, I know that even the memory has weight. Once in the war I saw a dead horse that had been lying long against the ground. Time and the birds, and its own last concentration had removed the body a great way from the head. As I looked upon that head, my memory weighed for the lost body; and because of that missing quantity even heavier hung that head along the ground. So love, when it has gone, taking time with it, leaves a memory of its weight.'

She said: 'She is myself. What am I to do?'

'Make birds' nests with your teeth, that would be better,' he said angrily, 'like my English girl friend. The birds liked them so well that they stopped making their own (does that sound like any nest you have made for any bird, and so broken it of its fate?). In the spring they form a queue by her bedroom window and stand waiting their turn, holding on to their eggs as hard as they can until she gets around to them, strutting up and down on the ledge, the eyes in their feathers a quick shine and sting, whipped with impatience, like a man waiting at a toilet door for someone inside who had decided to read the
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
And then think of Robin who never could provide for her life except in you. Oh, well,' he said under his breath, ' "happy are they whom privacy makes innocent."'

Nora turned around, and speaking in a voice that she tried to make steady said: 'Once, when she was sleeping, I wanted her to die. Now, that would stop nothing.'

The doctor, nodding, straightened his tie with two fingers. 'The number of our days is not check rein enough to look upon the death of our love. While living we knew her too well, and never understood, for then our next gesture permitted our next misunderstanding. But death is intimacy walking backward. We are crazed with grief when she, who once permitted us, leaves to us the only recollection. We shed tears of bankruptcy then. So it's well she didn't.' He sighed. 'You are still in trouble—I thought you had put yourself outside of it. I might have known better, nothing is what everybody wants, the world runs on that law. Personally, if I could, I would instigate Meat-Axe Day, and out of the goodness of my heart I would whack your head off along with a couple of others. Every man should be allowed one day and a hatchet just to ease his heart.'

She said: 'What will happen now, to me and to her?'

'Nothing,' the doctor answered, 'as always. We all go down in battle, but we all come home.'

She said: 'I can only find her again in my sleep or in her death; in both she has forgotten me.'

'Listen,' the doctor said, putting down his glass. 'My war brought me many things; let yours bring you as much. Life is not to be told, call it as loud as you like, it will not tell itself. No one will be much or little except in someone else's mind, so be careful of the minds you get into, and remember Lady Macbeth, who had her mind in her hand. We can't all be as safe as that.'

Nora got up nervously and began walking. 'I'm so miserable, Matthew, I don't know how to talk, and I've got to. I've got to talk to somebody. I can't live this way.' She pressed her hands together, and, without looking at the doctor, went on walking.

'Have you any more port?' he inquired, putting the empty bottle down. Mechanically, Nora brought him a second decanter. He took the stopper out, held it to his nose a moment, then poured himself a glass.

'You are', he said, testing the wine between his lower lip and teeth, 'experiencing the inbreeding of pain. Most of us do not dare it. We wed a stranger, and so "solve" our problem. But when you inbreed with suffering (which is merely to say that you have caught every disease and so pardoned your flesh) you are destroyed back to your structure as an old master disappears beneath the knife of the scientist who would know how it was painted. Death I imagine will be pardoned by the same identification; we all carry about with us the house of death, the skeleton, but unlike the turtle our safety is inside, our danger out. Time is a great conference planning our end, and youth is only the past putting a leg forward. Ah, to be able to hold on to suffering, but to let the spirit loose! And speaking of being destroyed, allow me to illustrate by telling you of one dark night in London, when I was hurrying along, my hands before me, praying I'd get home and into bed and wake up in the morning without finding my hands on my hips. So I started for London Bridge—all this was a long time ago, and I'd better be careful or one of these days I'll tell a story that will give up my age.

'Well, I went off under London Bridge and what should I see? A Tuppeny Upright! And do you know what a Tuppeny Upright might be? A Tuppeny is an old-time girl, and London Bridge is her last stand, as the last stand for a
grue
is Marseilles, if she doesn't happen to have enough pocket money to get to Singapore. For tuppence, an upright is all anyone can expect. They used to walk along slowly, all ruffles and rags, with big terror hats on them, a pin stuck over the eye and slap up through the crown, half their shadows on the ground and the other half crawling along the wall beside them; ladies of the
haute
sewer taking their last stroll, sauntering on their last Rotten Row, going slowly along in the dark, holding up their badgered flounces, or standing still, silent and as indifferent as the dead, as if they were thinking of better days, or waiting for something that they had been promised when they were little girls; their poor damned dresses hiked up and falling away over the rump, all gathers and braid, like a Crusader's mount, with all the trappings gone sideways with misery.'

While the doctor had been speaking Nora had stopped, as if he had got her attention for the first time.

'And once Father Lucas said to me, "Be simple, Matthew, life is a simple book, and an open book, read and be simple as the beasts in the field; just being miserable isn't enough—you have got to know how." So I got to thinking and I said to myself, "This is a terrible thing that Father Lucas has put on me—be simple like the beasts and yet think and harm nobody." I began walking then. It had begun to snow and the night was down. I went toward the
Ile
, because I could see the lights in the show-windows of Our Lady and all the children in the dark with the tapers twinkling, saying their prayers softly with that small breath that comes off little lungs, whispering fatally about nothing, which is the way children say their prayers. Then I said, "Matthew, tonight you must find a small church where there are no people, where you can be alone like an animal, and yet think." So I turned off and went down until I came to St. Merri and I went forward and there I was. All the candles were burning steadily for the troubles that people had entrusted to them and I was almost alone, only in a far corner an old peasant woman saying her beads.

'So I walked straight up to the box for the souls in Purgatory, just to show that I was a true sinner, in case there happened to be a Protestant about. I was trying to think which of my hands was the more blessed, because there's a box in the Raspail that says the hand you give with to the Little Sisters of the Poor, that will be blessed all day. I gave it up, hoping it was my right hand. Kneeling in a dark corner, bending my head over and down, I spoke to Tiny O'Toole, because it was his turn, I had tried everything else. There was nothing for it this time but to make him face the mystery so it could see him clear as it saw me. So then I whispered, "What is this thing, Lord?" And I began to cry; the tears went like rain goes down on the world, without touching the face of Heaven. Suddenly I realized that it was the first time in my life my tears were strange to me, because they just went straight forward out of my eyes; I was crying because I had to embarrass Tiny like that for the good it might do him.

'I was crying and striking my left hand against the prie-Dieu, and all the while Tiny O'Toole was lying in a swoon. I said, "I have tried to seek, and I only find." I said, "It is I, my Lord, who know there's beauty in any permanent mistakes like me. Haven't I said it so? But", I says, "I'm not able to stay permanent unless you help me, oh Book of Concealment!
C'est le plaisir qui me bouleversé
! The roaring lion goes forth, seeking his own fury! So tell me, what is permanent of me, me or him?" And there I was in the empty, almost empty church, all the people's troubles flickering in little lights all over the place. And I said, "This would be a fine world, Lord, if you could get everybody out of it." And there I was holding Tiny, bending over and crying, asking the question until I forgot, and went on crying, and I put Tiny away then, like a ruined bird, and went out of the place and walked looking at the stars that were twinkling, and I said, "Have I been simple like an animal, God, or have I been thinking?"'

She smiled. 'Sometimes I don't know why I talk to you. You're so like a child; then again I know well enough.'

'Speaking of children—and thanks for the compliment—take for instance the case of Don Anticolo, the young tenor from Beirut—he dipped down into his pelvis for his Wagner, and plunged to his breast pit for his Verdi—he'd sung himself once and a half round the world, a widower with a small son, scarcely ten by the clock when, presto—the boy was bitten by a rat while swimming in Venezia and this brought on a fever. His father would come in and take hold of him every ten minutes (or was it every half-hour?) to see if he was less hot, or hotter. His daddy was demented with grief and fear, but did he leave his bedside for a moment? He did, because, though the son was sick, the fleet was in. But being a father, he prayed as he drank the champagne; and he wished his son alive as he chucked over the compass and invited the crew home, bow and sprit. But when he got home the little son lay dead. The young tenor burst into tears and burned him and had the ashes put into a zinc box no bigger than a doll's crate and held ceremony over him, twelve sailors all in blue standing about the deal table, a glass in their hands, sorrow in their sea-turned eye slanting under lids thinned by the horizon, as the distracted father and singer tossed the little zinc box down upon the table crying: "This, gentlemen, is my babe, this, lads, my son, my sailors, my boy!" and at that, running to the box and catching it up and dashing it down again, repeating, and weeping, "My son, my baby, my boy!" with trembling fingers nudging the box now here now there about the table, until it went up and down its length a dozen times; the father behind it, following it, touching it, weeping and crying like a dog who noses a bird that has, for some strange reason, no more movement.'

The doctor stood up, then sat down again. 'Yes, oh God, Robin was beautiful. I don't like her, but I have to admit that much: sort of fluid blue under her skin, as if the hide of time had been stripped from her, and with it, all transactions with knowledge. A sort of first position in attention; a face that will age only under the blows of perpetual childhood. The temples like those of young beasts cutting horns, as if they were sleeping eyes. And that look on a face we follow like a witch-fire. Sorcerers know the power of horns; meet a horn where you like and you know you have been identified. You could fall over a thousand human skulls without the same trepidation. And do old duchesses know it also! Have you ever seen them go into a large assembly of any sort, be it opera or bezique, without feathers, flowers, sprigs of oat, or some other gadget nodding above their temples!'

She had not heard him. 'Every hour is my last, and,' she said desperately, 'one can't live one's last hour all one's life!'

He grinned. 'Even the contemplative life is only an effort, Nora my dear, to hide the body so the feet won't stick out. Ah,' he added, 'to be an animal, born at the opening of the eye, going only forward, and, at the end of day, shutting out memory with the dropping of the lid.'

'Time isn't long enough,' she said, striking the table. 'It isn't long enough to live down her nights. God,' she cried, 'what is love? Man seeking his own head? The human head, so rented by misery that even the teeth weigh! She couldn't tell me the truth, because she had never planned it; her life was a continual accident, and how can you be prepared for that? Everything we can't bear in this world, some day we find in one person, and love it all at once. A strong sense of identity gives man an idea he can do no wrong; too little accomplishes the same. Some natures cannot appreciate, only regret. Will Robin
only
regret?' She stopped abruptly, gripping the back of the chair. 'Perhaps not,' she said, 'for even her memory wearied her.' Then she said with the violence of misery, 'There's something evil in me, that loves evil and degradation—purity's black backside! That loves honesty with a horrid love; or why have I always gone seeking it at the liar's door?'