The Decay Of The Angel (26 page)
Read The Decay Of The Angel Online
Authors: Yukio Mishima
“The old man’s being awful sulky.”
Perhaps the sufferings of the old man did in fact come to nothing more than sulkiness. Honda could see in them foolishness beyond defending. It had all been his own doing and not Tōru’s. There was no need for surprise at the change in Tōru. Honda had seen at the first glance the “evil” in the boy.
But at the moment he wanted to measure the depth of the wound inflicted on his self-respect by what he had asked for.
Honda disliked air-conditioning and was at an age when he feared stairs. He had a large twelve-mat room on the ground floor, looking out over the garden to the cottage. Built in the medieval
shoin
style, it was the oldest and gloomiest room in the house. Honda ranged four linen cushions in a row. He lay down and then sat up on his heels. With all the sliding doors pulled shut, he let the heat accumulate. Sometimes he would crawl to the table for a drink of water. It was as warm as in full sunlight.
shoin
style, it was the oldest and gloomiest room in the house. Honda ranged four linen cushions in a row. He lay down and then sat up on his heels. With all the sliding doors pulled shut, he let the heat accumulate. Sometimes he would crawl to the table for a drink of water. It was as warm as in full sunlight.
Time went past along the indefinable line between waking and sleeping, like a nap at the ultimate end of anger and sadness. Even the pain in his hips would have been a distraction, but today there was none. He was only exhausted.
An unfathomable disaster seemed to be coming down on him, only made worse by the fact that it had precise, delicate gradations, and, like a subtly compounded potion, was having the predicted effect. Honda’s old age should have been free of vanity, ambition, honor, prestige, reason, and above all emotion. But it wanted cheer. Although he should have forgotten all feeling long ago, black irritation and anger continued to smolder like a bed of embers. Stirred, they sent off a reeking smoke.
There was autumn in the sunlight on the paper doors, but isolation contained no signs of movement, of change into something else, like the change of the seasons. All was stagnation. He could see them clearly in himself, anger and sadness that should not have been there, like puddles after a rain. The feeling born this morning was like a bed of leaves ten years old, and new each instant. All the unpleasant memories poured in upon him, but he could not, like a youth, say that his life was unhappy.
When the light at the window told him that evening was near, sexual desire stirred in the crouching Honda. It was not a sudden onset of desire, but rather something tepid that had gestated through hours of sadness and anger and coiled round his brain like a red worm.
The driver he had used over the years had retired, and his successor had been guilty of certain indiscretions. And so Honda had sold his automobile and now used rented cars. At ten he called a maid on the interphone and asked her to order a car. He took out a black summer suit and a gray sports shirt.
Tōru was out. The maids looked with curiosity upon the nocturnal departure of the eighty-year-old Honda.
When the car turned into the Meiji Gardens, Honda’s desire had become something like a faint attack of nausea. Here he was again, after twenty years.
But it was not sexual desire that had burned in him all through the ride.
His hands on his stick, more erect than usual, he had been muttering to himself: “I only have to endure it six months more. Just six months more. If he’s the real thing.”
That “if” made him tremble. If Tōru were to die in the six months before his twenty-first birthday, everything could be forgiven. Only the awareness of that birthday had made it possible for Honda to endure the arrogance. And if Tōru was counterfeit?
The thought of Tōru’s death had been a great comfort. In his humiliation he had concentrated upon Tōru’s death, in his heart already killed him. His heart was quiet, happiness welled up, his nose twitched with tolerance and pity when he saw death, like the sun through isinglass, beyond the violence and cruelty. He could be drunk on the open cruelty of what is called charity. Perhaps that was what he had found in the light upon the vast, empty Indian plain.
He had not yet detected in himself symptoms of a fatal illness. There was nothing to be alarmed about in his blood pressure or his heart. He was confident that if he lasted another half year he would outlive Tōru, perhaps by only a few days. What quiet, secure tears he would be able to shed! Before the foolish world, he would play the part of the tragic father deprived of the son he had come upon so late in life. He could not deny that there was pleasure in looking forward to Tōru’s death, in looking ahead to it with the quiet love, oozing sweet poison, of one who knows everything. Tōru’s violence, beguiling and lovable, seen through the time ahead as through a Mayfly’s wing. People do not love pets that will outlive them. A short life is a condition for love.
And perhaps Tōru was fretting at a prospect like a strange, unheard-of ship suddenly appearing on a horizon which he had been scanning for days. Perhaps a foretaste of death was moving him, irritating him. The possibility brought unbounded gentleness over Honda. He felt that he could love not only Tōru but the whole human race. He knew the nature of human love.
But if Tōru was counterfeit? If he was to live on and on, and Honda, unable to keep up with him, to waste away?
The roots of the strangling desire within him were in the uncertainty. If he was to die first, then he could not refuse the basest of desires. He might all along have been destined to die in humiliation and miscalculation. The miscalculation about Tōru may itself have been the trap laid by Honda’s destiny. If a person like Honda had a destiny.
The fact that Tōru’s awareness was too much like his own had long been a seed of disquiet. Perhaps Tōru had read everything. Perhaps Tōru knew that he would live a long life, and, reading the determined malice in the practical education given him by an old man confident of his early death, had plotted his revenge.
Perhaps the eighty-year-old and the twenty-year-old were even now engaged in close combat over life and death.
Night in the Meiji Gardens, for the first time in twenty years. The car had turned left from the Gondawara entrance and was on the circular drive.
“Keep going, keep going.” Each time Honda gave the order he added a cough, like a bothersome accessory.
Egg-colored shirts appeared and disappeared among the night trees. For the first time in a very long while, Honda felt that very special throb in his chest. Old desire still lay piled under the trees like last year’s leaves.
“Go on, go on.”
The car turned right behind the art gallery, where the groves were thickest. There were two or three couples. The lighting was as inadequate as ever. Suddenly there was a glaring cluster of lights to the left. In the middle of the park the entrance to the expressway gaped with a multitude of lights, like a deserted amusement park.
To the right would be the grove on the left side of the art gallery. The night trees cut off the dome, and branches poured out over the sidewalk, a tangle of firs, plantains, pines. Even from the moving car he could hear the insects in the clump of agaves. As if it had been yesterday, he remembered the ferocity of the mosquitoes in the thickets and the sound of slapping against naked skin.
He dismissed the car at the parking lot by the art gallery. The driver glanced at him from under a narrow forehead. It was the sort of glance that can sometimes work collapse. You may go, Honda said again, more strongly. Pushing his stick out on the sidewalk ahead of him, he climbed from the car.
The parking lot was closed at night. A sign said that access was forbidden. A barricade blocked off the entrance. There was no light in the attendant’s shelter, and no sign of life.
Looking after the car, Honda walked down the sidewalk past the agaves. They flung out harsh leaves, a pale green in the darkness, quiet, like a clump of malice. There were few passers-by, only a man and woman on the sidewalk opposite.
Having come as far as the façade of the art gallery, Honda stopped and looked at the great empty scheme in which he found himself. The dome and the two wings rose powerfully into the moonless night. The rectangular pond and the white gravel of the terrace, long streaks of light from the lamps cutting off the dim white of the gravel like the line of the tide. To the left loomed the round wall of the Olympic Stadium, its now-dark floodlights high against the sky. Far below, lamps, like a mist, touched the outermost branches of the trees.
In the symmetrical plaza, which contained no shadow of desire, Honda felt as if he were at the center of the Womb Mandala.
The Womb Mandala, one of the two elemental worlds, is paired with the Diamond Mandala. Its symbol is the lotus, and its Buddhas manifest the virtue of charity.
The womb has also the meaning of inclusiveness. Just as the womb of the beggar woman held the embryo of the Lord of Light, so the muddied heart of the ordinary man holds the wisdom and mercy of all Buddhas.
The perfect symmetry of the shining mandala holds at its center the Court of the Eight-Petaled Lotus, abode of the Lord of Great Light. Twelve courts stretch out in the four directions, and the abodes of the several Buddhas are fixed with delicate and detailed symmetry.
If the dome of the art gallery, high in the moonless night, was taken for the central court, then the avenue where Honda stood, separated from it by the pond, was perhaps the abode of the Peacock Lord, to the west of the Court of Emptiness.
With the Buddhas disposed geometrically on the golden mandala transferred to the dark groves of the symmetrical plaza, the expanse of gravel and the emptiness of the sidewalk were suddenly filled, merciful faces were everywhere, dizzying in the full light of day. The more than two hundred holy faces, and more than two hundred of the Diamond Mandala as well, were shining in the groves, and the ground was ablaze with light.
The vision faded as he walked off. The night was filled with the singing of insects, cicada voices stitched the shadows like needles.
The familiar path was still there through the groves, to the right of the art gallery. He remembered with longing that the smell of the grass and of the night trees had been an indispensable part of desire.
He felt the return of a sharp sense of pleasure, as if he were crossing a tideland, at his feet the workings of fish and shellfish and starfish and crustaceans and seahorses, as at night on a coral reef, the water lapping warm against the soles of his feet, in danger of being cut at each step by the pointed rocks. Pleasure dashed ahead, the body was unable to follow. Signs, indications, were everywhere. As his eyes grew accustomed to the dark he saw white shirts scattered through the groves, like the aftermath of a slaughter.
There was a previous caller in the shadows where Honda hid himself. Honda could tell from the dark shirt if from nothing else that it was a veteran peeper. The man was so short, coming only to Honda’s shoulders, that Honda at first took him for a boy. When he made out the grizzled head, the moist breathing so near at hand seemed heavy and stupid.
Presently the man’s eyes left their object and were trained on Honda’s profile. Honda looked studiously away, but he had felt that the short gray hair bristling from the temples was somehow related to a disconcerting memory. He struggled to bring it out. The usual cough rose to his throat, though he fought to keep it back.
A certain confidence came into the man’s breathing. Raising himself to his full height, he whispered in Honda’s ear.
“So we meet again. You still come, do you? You haven’t forgotten?”
Honda turned and looked into the rodent eyes. A memory came back from twenty-two years before. It was the man who had stopped him in front of the Ginza P.X.
And he remembered with fear how coldly he had treated the man, asserting mistaken identity.
“You needn’t worry. Here is here and there is there. Let’s let bygones be bygones.” This way of forestalling Honda’s thoughts added to the uneasiness. “But you’ll have to stop that coughing.” He turned to look busily off beyond the tree trunks.
Breathing more easily as the man moved some distance away, Honda looked into the grasses beyond the tree. The throbbing had departed, however. It had been replaced by uneasiness and, again, anger and sadness. Self-forgetfulness withdrew as he pursued it. Though the spot was well suited for viewing the man and woman on the grass, there was a false quality about them, as if they knew they were being watched and were acting parts. There was none of the joy in seeing, there was neither the sweet pressure from the recesses of scrutiny nor drunkenness of clarity itself.
Though they were only a yard or two away, the light was too dim for him to make out details or the expressions on the faces. There seemed to be no screen between him and them, and he could approach no nearer. He hoped that if he went on looking the old throb would return. One hand against the trunk of the tree, one hand on his stick, he looked down at the couple.
Although the little man showed no disposition to interfere with his sport, Honda went on remembering things he should not have remembered. Since his own stick was uncurved, he could not hope to imitate the virtuosity of the old man who used his stick to lift skirts. The man had been old then, and no doubt he was dead by now. No doubt rather large numbers of the old men in the “audience” had died in the course of these twenty years. And not a few among the young “performers” too would have married and gone away, or died in traffic accidents or from juvenile cancer or high blood pressure or heart and kidney ailments. Because movements and transfers are far brisker among the performers than in the audience, some of them would be in apartment clusters in bedroom towns an hour or so by private railway from Tokyo, ignoring wives and children and abandoning themselves to the joys of television. And the day was at hand when some of them would join the audience.
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