Sixty Lights (16 page)
Authors: Gail Jones
“Flecked,” he repeated. “That is it, exactly. Nothing in my cabinet of curiosities is without fleck.”
It was some time later, when Lucy had become a photographer herself, that she considered again, and more critically, the spectacle of the dead elephant and her own credulity. Vision included these ghastly moments and fearful contaminations. In India she had seen things she wished instantly to forget, things that rose up to the eyes with unmediated power. Violations. Deaths. Sufferings exceeding any image. She was ashamed at the vulgarity of her wish to beautify. How, she wondered silently, to attest it all? All the lights, all the darks, all the blotted cloudings in between.
Dearest Lucy
,
It seems such a long time since you left and Neville and I both miss you terribly. We received your news with some dismay, but are pleased that Mr Newton has made sensible arrangements after the confinement for your return to England. You draw a veil over the details â perhaps it is shame or distress that quietens your pen â but if you should decide to tell of the events on that disastrous ship, and if you should ever wish to identify the fellow who robbed you of your innocence, I shall listen with loving compassion and take action as appropriate or necessary. I can never forgive myself for not accompanying you on the passage to India, and ask you, dear sister, to one day pardon my mistake. Enough said, for the moment, on this difficult topic, but know that both I and Neville are concerned fundamentally for your precious well-being, and long to have you returned to us safely and in good health.
My work at the Childish Establishment continues to flourish. Mr Childe has kindly taken me under his wing, as they say, and taught me the trade of magic-lantern operator. I can set slides, work the lamps, and direct musicians and narrators. Recently we showed a series of scenes from Shakespeare, and I thought of you, dear sister, when the ghost scene from Hamlet arrived. Mr Childe had arranged for a puff of smoke and a cymbal clap to accompany the ghost's appearance (the slide itself was a little disappointing â clearly a man enshrouded in a sheet), but a woman in the front row rose up, screamed, and then collapsed
in a faint. This event caused a sensation. I could not help thinking: partickler when she see the ghost!
My good fortune continues: I made the acquaintance of the faint young woman, who turns out to be exactly my age and employed in the City as a teacher of pianoforte. Her name is Violet Weller and I believe â though I have told no-one and can barely believe I am disclosing it to you â that we may, God-willing, have a future together. She is sweet and intelligent and shares my love of the phantasmagoria, to which she has often come (although, to be truthful, I had not noticed her presence before). Violet lives with her parents â whom I've yet to meet â somewhere in Kentish Town.
Uncle Neville continues to search for our mother and has found a new medium, one he considers superior to Madame d'Esperance. The new woman, Madame Noir, is dark and possibly gypsy, and Neville believes that this alone recommends her and makes her more spiritually competent. So far our ectoplasmic mother has predicted your safe return with a healthy son, and Neville is much heartened by this news and mentions it frequently. He hopes, I cautiously add, the infant might be named for him.
Neville has found some irregular work at an importers' warehouse in the docklands where, luck of luck, he works with Indian products and is again immersed in the world of his beloved spices. He brings home samples for me to try, but I cannot abide the tastes. When you return, Neville says, he shall cook an Indian curry in celebration, and he will supply the proper ingredients in the proper proportions!
Neville's health, I must confess, is not the best. He looks old and ruddy and has a shortness of breath and pains in the chest, for which he takes a noxious-looking tincture, supplied by Madame Noir. It has yet to prove an efficient remedy, and I fear it represents another dimension of his too-trusting nature. He also calls out at night, and is troubled by bad dreams, but says that â thankfully â since I began working the lanterns my sleepwalking has ceased. My own health is robust â touch wood â I have none of those spasms of coughing you witnessed before
you left. Violet told me I looked “in the pink” of health, which I took to be a compliment and evidence of her growing affection towards me.
Neville says to send you his love and requests that you seek “native” advice for the time of birth. He claims the Indians have a secret system of healing over four thousand years old and that it is based on the body's composition of energies of earth, fire and wind. The fire sign, he says, is connected to a kind of bodily light, which he claims must be regulated in the act of birth. (He also told me that my sleepwalking was a disorder of wind!) I have no notion of the veracity of this information or the soundness of the advice, but promised Uncle Neville I would pass it on.
We await your return anxiously and with much loving eagerness. Travel safely, dear sister, and guard your own new light carefully.
Your ever-loving brother,
Thomas
IT WAS IN
the fifth month of her pregnancy, when Lucy showed, even then, only a small mound of belly, that she travelled with Isaac to the island of Elephanta. In the Bombay Harbour, a few miles from the city, rested an immense temple complex, carved of rock, and dedicated to the three-faced god, Shiva. Isaac said it was one site he hoped they would visit together. On the ferry, they rode comfortably in each other's company. Lucy felt exulted to be once again on the water. The world before her was like blown glass: some fluid shape expanding, sphere-wise and breathful, into a glistening new form, some sense of the weird plausibility of transmogrification. The wind was high and the broad boat rocked and tossed. Lucy saw Isaac seize the railing and vomit into the heaving ocean. She turned her face into full sunshine and full wind, held on to her bonnet, and smiled. Fishermen,
kolis
, squatted confidently on the prows of their small wooden craft, received and answered her waves, surprised, perhaps, at this foreigner's bold and out-of-the-ordinary friendliness. She would have liked to call out a greeting in their language, but realised, with a shock of shame, that she knew no kind hallos and no grateful expressions. So she placed her hands in a temple shape and bowed in their direction.
They disembarked on a small beach, at which an old woman
in a brown sari sold lotus-seed rosaries, and had a long climb, up stone steps, to the Elephanta Cave. Isaac chattered like Baedeker: “This island was named by the Portuguese”, he declared, “for an elephant statue that resided here, at the beach. It was moved away in 1814. The Portuguese â vile desecrators â defaced many of the carvings, but what you will see is still remarkable . . . finished somewhere between 450 and 750 AD . . . carved directly into stone, a huge effort, incredibly significant . . .”
He puffed as he spoke. Lucy surged up the steps towards the temple, hoping to leave him behind and to recover her own quiet thoughts; but then took pity on Isaac and waited, looking down on his hatted head, feeling unaccustomed affection, taking his trembly hand at the very top of the steps.
Before her were massive stone columns at the main entrance to the temple, which was composed of shrines, aisles, courtyards and porticos.
“It was designed in a great mandala,” Isaac said, “to accommodate a circumambulatory ritual that involved observance of images dedicated to the god Shiva. Energy”, he added enigmatically, “is the purpose of this shape.”
Inside was chill, damp and mysterious. Lucy clutched Isaac's hand and felt a squeeze of acknowledgement. They were friends, after all. They stood side by side in the sacred shadows.
The most beautiful statue was the Trimurti, the triple-headed god, tall, calm and resting with eyes closed. Lucy had seen many representations of Shiva in Bombay, but this grey basalt figure, dignified and elaborate, seemed to her the most compelling. There were scenes too of Shiva myths â his wedding with Parvati, his impaling of the demon of darkness on a trident, his emerging from a mountain and holding back the waters of the Ganges; there was even the remains of the dancing Shiva, the Nataraj, Isaac called it, with his extra arms
and his leg raised, dancing in a halo of fire. At the centre of the temple was an abstract shape, long, pure, resting in a circular receptacle. It dripped water and was smeared with sandalwood paste. Flowers and bel leaves draped and adorned its borders.
Lucy looked across at Isaac, silently questioning. He cleared his throat and nervously adjusted his cravat.
“It's the male organ,” Isaac said. “The Shiva lingam. Fertility. Another image, you might say, of the divinity of Shiva. There are also female organs that serve for worship.”
Lucy paused. She felt perplexed, dumb, enshrined in her own cramped circle of questions. What did she know? She knew that there were images, things seen, imperative as desire; that there were stories in images and the theft of essences in photographs; that myths were remade in stained glass and cast in bronze and stone, and that in the midst of all these verifying representations, she was a creature of half-belief, or no-belief, for whom all these mysteries were garbled, or blank, or intractably mistranslated.
Isaac looked wan and drawn. The short voyage and the climb up the stone stairs had exhausted him. But Lucy felt her own vigour converging as questions converged.
“Like the crucifix, this simplicity?”
“Well, yes,” Isaac hesitated, “except that this symbolism is of course sexual, not deathly.”
“Sexual not deathly,” she repeated, to Isaac's embarrassment.
Isaac looked down at his English shoes.
“There are many kinds of shrine, then?”
“Yes,” he confirmed. “There are many, many kinds of shrine.”
Is the camera a shrine?
Later, as Lucy made her way, much too quickly, back down
the stairs to the water, she thought, as she stepped, of the human eye â pupil, lens, crystalline humour. Then she thought of the camera, the extension of her eye, the black-magic box of secluded light, the black box of recorded and refracted information, of objects inverted, of death defeated. She thought too of the glass plates that held the envisioned world â in eight by ten inches â returned to itself, as an act â surely â as an act of devotion. Lucy halted on the steps to look back at Isaac, above and behind her. He was a thin struggling shape. He gave a feeble wave. Called out something. Hurried up. Reached for his hat. Again she stopped and waited, overcome with sympathetic affection, consenting, in her own way, to let him join her.
At the beach, Lucy purchased a rosary of lotus seeds. This signified no sudden accession of piety, but simple concern for the old woman in the worn brown sari who stood there in the heat, looking impoverished and desperate for a sale. On the water, once again, she turned her face to the sun. The ocean was lustrous, glaring, a vast fluid light, round as an eyeball and puckered in the still-rising wind.
There are many, many kinds of shrine.
IT WAS
,
THEY
agreed, like a brief form of marriage. In the last few months of her pregnancy, Isaac and Lucy behaved as man and wife; they slept in the same bed and kissed goodnight, they offered up verbal intimacies and cared for each other, even though both knew of their inevitable parting. It was a pretence that afforded each a temporary rescue from loneliness and the exchange of whispered secrets deep in the night. It was tender and richly embraced â not merely convenient â and both behaved towards the other with poise and respect. Isaac told Lucy of his occasion of weeping at the Frankfurt performance of
The Flying Dutchman
, and she evinced no surprise, but congratulated him on the candour of his youthful response. Later, emboldened, and much to his own surprise, he told her he had been in love with her uncle, Neville â
enamoured
was the word he actually used â that he had been demented with desire and sick with lust. Lucy tried to imagine Uncle Neville so wholly attractive, but somehow could not; yet she was moved by the trust implicit in Isaac's confession. In return Lucy told Isaac of her parents' deaths, of the arrival of Neville in Australia and the trip to England. She described the albumen factory, and spoke at length on her theories of photographic seeing. She did not speak â not ever â of William Crowley, nor did she mention her
Special Things Seen.
The stories they exchanged threaded the gulf of night, years, nations and experience, lacing them close. They lay in the high tapering cone of a mosquito net, chatting in random, sincere disclosures. When asked about his faith Isaac declared he was atheist: he believed gods were the imaginative projection of human qualities and adventures. Lucy agreed. “But this did not diminish”, Isaac added, “the art achievements of sacred expression that seemed in themselves, and of themselves, transcendental . . . Mystery inheres only in art,” Isaac said firmly.
Lucy had rejoined with the obvious question: “But what is art?”
One day Lucy had been out, on an excursion with Bashanti, when they witnessed an accident. A man was scaling a building, carrying a large mirror, when he lost his footing and fell to the ground. Since he did not release the mirror it shattered into his body as he landed; a long spear of glass entered his chest and another cut an artery in his arm. Blood spurted everywhere and the man died almost instantly. He was young and rather handsome, lying in the shiny mess with his dead eyes open and his turban undone. A curious crowd gathered, murmuring their shock, and Bashanti began weeping quietly into her dupatta. What in retrospect disturbed Lucy was her fascination. She stared fixedly at the scene: the angled spears of mirror reflecting the gathering crowd; crows flying upwards from a tamarind in a spray of black shapes; the woman in a blue sari who leaned forward to seek a pulse in the dead man's neck, then retreated, her garment stained with blood. The mirror and the blood were an irresistible combination. Lucy could not help herself; she thought of repetition; she thought of a photograph.
