The Infinities (22 page)

What a pair we must have made, though, Benny and I, the overman in his overman’s cape and tights flashing through the ether with his fat sidekick clinging on for dear life to his neck. Or was it the other way round, him flying and I clinging on, for dear life? For dear life is what I could never quite get the hang of. Others seem to manage it easily enough: they just do it, or have it done to them—perhaps that is the secret, not so much to live as be lived, let life itself do the work. Certainly that was how Benny seemed to carry it off. Fetching up breathless with emptied pockets and skinned knees after another one of our escapades together, I would look around and find him brushing the dust off his sleeve and humming unconcernedly to himself, as if we had been on nothing more adventurous than a Sunday-afternoon stroll. Did I have a taste for the low life before Benny came along and dragged me gaily into the gutter for a respite? I know I liked it, once I was there, paddling in the piss and spittle. Here, I told myself, is the real thing, the business itself, raw and coarse and vital, this is what it is to be alive. No gentle Inges or Ursulas down there, only drabs and cutpurses and the odd poor Gretchen searching forlornly for her Faust.

I should not exaggerate. I am at heart a timid soul and the
scrapes that Benny got me into were no more than that, scrapes and japes and schoolboy pranks. He would turn up at odd times and in unexpected places, but if I was surprised, he never was. That was the uncanny thing, the way he would come bustling yet again into my life, in mid-sentence, as it were, and link his fat arm through mine and steer me aside from whatever I was doing and walk me off into a corner to propose in an earnest undertone some new, preposterous wheeze. He always made it seem that he had been gone no more than a moment or two and now was back, doing up his flies or rolling his shirt sleeves, ready to get the ructions going again. Girls, of course, there were always girls, I marvelled at his way with them. What did they see in him, what was the secret of his roly-poly charm? He would wander off into a crowded bar, a hotel lobby, a conference hall, and come back five minutes later with a likely romp on either arm, the short one for him and the tall one for me. More often than not these encounters fetched up in disaster, or farce, or both—gin-tinted tears, smeared mascara, a definitively hitched-up black silk strap—but Benny was never daunted, would accept no rebuff, admit no failure.

He deplored my taste for Inge and her ilk, the dainty, damaged ones, but I felt no call to defend myself against his gibes once I met Madame Mac. Here I must pause, and confess to a slight constraint, a slight embarrassment. That I took her at first for his mother is one thing, but that I am still uncertain that she was not—his mother, I mean—is surely quite another. He never said who she was, exactly, or specified the nature of their relation, and in the way of these things, after a certain interval it became impossible to ask. He referred to her only as Madame Mac or, sometimes, as “my old lady,” so there was no help there.

Early on there seemed a clear disparity in age between them, and he could well have been her son, but as the years progressed and age coarsened his admittedly never youthful form the gap narrowed and with it my uncertainty widened.

He was not himself, not the self that I was accustomed to, when he was with her. His demeanour veered between a worried lover’s fawning deference and a brusque irritability that to my ear bespoke the filial. I was first introduced to Madame Mac, if
introduced
is the word, in Rome, I believe it was. I was there to accept the Borgia Prize, founded in memory of gentle Cesare, peacemaker and patron of natural sciences and the arts. I remember well the hotel, one of those gloomy timeless palaces to be found in every capital city, the corridors humming with a vast silence, in all the rooms a worryingly fecal smell, and the unseen below-stairs staff audibly at their larks. In the muffled lounge, where it would always be afternoon, vague bodies were fidgeting over coffee cups and little cakes, and the tall windows were ablaze with an amazement of blue October sky. Had Benny and I arranged to meet or was it another of our chance stumblings across each other?—chance on my part, if not on his. Under one of the windows a woman was seated in an armchair before a low table; with the light behind her I could not make out her features, though I had the feeling that she was regarding me intently. She was leaning forward rather heavily, her skirt stretched tight over splayed knees, while the chair in which she was seated seemed to reach out its stubby wings on either side of her as if striving to draw her back into its brocaded embrace. The dress she wore was made of what seemed swathe upon swathe of multicoloured stuff printed with a large design, roses or peonies or some such, and might have been a continuation of the figured
covering of the armchair, so that she was camouflaged and appeared a congeries of disjointed parts, head, arms and hands, thick short legs. All this detail noted in hindsight, of course. At her back, in a corner of the window, an oleander bush tossed and tossed in the hot wind of a Roman autumn.

Benny when he arrived was all bustle and hand-rubbing. He was wearing his inveterate black suit and grubby white shirt. He complained of the chilly air-conditioning—it is never warm enough for Benny, we have that in common—and chafed his hands the harder. He seemed uninclined to sit, and due to the way my chair was facing I had to turn my head awkwardly to the side and upwards in order to meet his eye. Come to think of it, there was always an awkwardness in the stance I felt myself forced to adopt in his presence, I had always a crick in my neck when he is about. I noted a certain shiftiness in his manner on this occasion, a certain breathy excitedness. He said he would take a glass of wine but seemed to be concerned with something else. He was casting about the room as if at random, and now his glance came to rest on the woman by the window. Did they exchange a signal? Benny cleared his throat and mumbled something, then walked to where the woman was sitting and positioned himself beside her chair in the attitude, head back and one shoulder lifted, of a frock-coated gentleman posing for a daguerreotype, and directed back at me a summoning frown. I rose uncertainly and went to him. “This,” he said gruffly, almost dismissively, “is Madame Mac.”

She directed at me from her chair a calmly appraising gaze, and lifted a hand as if for me to kiss it, the back of it graciously arched and fingers limply dangling; I shook it. The thing had the cartilaginous smoothness and faint heat of a bird’s claw. She was
wearing something on her head, a close-fitting hat or a scarf tightly bound, which made me think of Lily Brik shouting the good news in that famous poster, or of one of Millet’s cloched peasant women. I had the impression of bright festoons, bits of ribbon, silk streamers that shimmered and fluttered about her. Her face appeared wider than it was long, with a great carven jaw and an almost lipless mouth that seemed to stretch from ear to ear and managed to be at once froggy and almost noble. Her skin was greyish-pale and looked as dry as meal. Within the voluminous dress she wore there was the suggestion of hidden folds of unrestrained flesh. Foul-minded as I am I at once set to picturing Benny and her engaged in congress, like a pair of walruses thrashing and trumpeting in a boiling sea; perhaps that is why, the next moment, my mind introduced to me the possibility of a blood tie between them, so that I should never again be obliged to entertain such an image. Madame Mac’s eyes were the thing that struck me most forcefully. They were glossy, slightly starting, not large but unnervingly piercing, and so intense they made the rest of her features, even that extraordinary mouth, fade behind their light. My memory of that first occasion insists her eyes were black, but later when I took the trouble to notice them they seemed a shade of deep violet—can eyes change colour, according to circumstance, the play of light, the mood of the moment? I must have sat down. I do not know what I said to her, or she to me. Did she have an accent? It did not strike me, if she had. Another mystery. At her shoulder, in the window, the oleander bush with its polished leaves shivered and shook, as if successive douses of water were being poured through it. Perhaps it was the contrast between the stillness of her broad grey flat face and the frantic movements of the bush behind it and the
scraps of fluttering silk about her person, but what she reminded me of most strongly was an electric fan, with its warning tassel tied to the mesh, turning its bland, tilted head slowly from side to side, and the blades behind the mesh a motionless blur as they spun and spun and spun.

Benny launched on a rambling account of how he and I had first met, that chilly midsummer in the far north. There was an edge of dismissiveness to his tone, of heavy-breathing impatience, as if he were a pupil compelled to tell over a dull passage not fully memorised. Madame Mac seemed not to be listening, seemed, indeed, oblivious of him. She was studying me still, letting her gaze, at once vague and penetrating, wander all over me with a feline impassiveness while, behind, the blades went on silently spinning. Held there, listening to Benny recite his ill-learned lesson and suffering Madame Mac’s scrutiny, I had the uncomfortable sensation of being somehow lifted up and carried between them, like a satrap borne lullingly down an ever-narrowing defile towards the lair of the assassin. The waiter came with Benny’s wine and Benny took the glass and sucked up a greedy gulp and stared off into space, no longer speaking. He seemed to require something of me, to be silently asking me for something, some understanding or tacit acceptance.

Later that same evening Madame Mac told me the story of her life, or parts of it, parts of the story, parts of her life. We were outside, on the hotel terrace, overlooking an expanse of floodlit historic rubble. Bats flitted here and there in the mauve twilight. I was chilled, and not quite sober, and could not concentrate very well on the knotted fabric of the tale she was elaborately weaving. At some time in the indeterminate past she had entered on a brief and, she emphasised, issueless union with the
Honourable Mr. MacSomebody, a wealthy invert with delicate lungs, ambassador Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Somewhere to the Holy See, owner of a succession of grand houses, on Capri, in Paris, in Manhattan and Sidi bel Abbès, who before his untimely and, she murmuringly attested, highly picturesque demise had enjoined her to employ the large inheritance she would have from him towards the betterment of mankind in general and in particular the encouragement of the physical sciences, in which the Ambassador had long maintained a keen amateur interest. I listened to this farrago in captivated bemusement, sipping at my sixth or seventh flute of sour prosecco and inhaling the stench of drains that Rome was sending up to us like the fumes from a votive offering. Madame Mac as she spoke bore into me mesmerisingly with those protuberant little shiny eyes of hers, swaying somewhat before me like a cobra poised on its rings. Perhaps it was all true, Mr. Mac and his bad lungs, the minareted mansion in the Maghreb, the deathbed injunction, all of it. The world has many worlds, as who should know better than I, each one stranger, more various and for all I know more farcical than the last. Anything is possible. When she finished we both stood silent for some moments, looking into our glasses, then suddenly, with a sort of wobbling lurch, she leaned her large front against me and fumbled for my hand, which she found, and clutched tightly. The result of all this was that I lost my balance, and would have fallen down, taking her with me, if there had not been the pockmarked limestone parapet to support us. What if we had toppled off the balcony and plunged into the ruins below? What would Benny have thought, when we were found, bloodied and broken, spreadeagled hand in hand on a broken suggestum close by one of Vespasian’s first erections?

It occurred to me that she might have been offering me money. Why else all this talk of the Hon. Mr. Mac’s love of science and his philanthropical bent and of the inheritance she had of him—why else the sudden impassioned intimacy, the desperate seizing upon my hand? Gently I disengaged from her, feeling like a young lady of genteel upbringing who has just been invited by a fat old madam to come for a try-out at the brothel. We turned and went back into the hotel, I embarrassed and she very thoughtful. And the next time I saw her, she was dying.

Was it the next time? Did I only encounter her twice? I do not remember. It was Benny, naturally, who took me to see her in that hospital in the mountains. High summer it was up there, the sound of cowbells impossibly close in the clean, thin air—I thought at first it was a recording that the hospital was piping into the rooms, instead of the usual soothing music. Madame Mac had been wandering back and forth across the continent for months, like a wounded animal searching for a place in which to die. Bald and bloated, she lay uncovered on the narrow white bed like something vegetable that had been thrown there, her eyes swivelling agitatedly and her fingers plucking at the sheet. Despite the circumstances she was tricked out as usual in her varicoloured bobs and bows. I tried not to see her large bare mottled knees. The Alpine sun shone in the window with gay indifference. At first I thought she did not know me but then she clutched my hand hotly in hers—again!—and started to tell me in a gabbled whisper about something that had happened a long time ago, even the drift of which I could not grasp. I pretended to understand, however, and tried to seem interested—oh, that sickly smile that smears itself over one’s face on these occasions!—but Benny tugged at my arm and made a little moue of
discouragement, and I stepped back, and Madame Mac let go my hand and of all things gave an exasperated sigh of laughter, as an aunt would sigh ruefully over a doted-upon but unmannerly nephew, and I felt clumsy and churlish, and snatched my arm away from Benny and walked out of the room. Whether or not I met her on more occasions than the ones I remember I do not know, but I do know that was to be the last I would see of her.

A little later on that occasion we found ourselves, Benny and I, standing on a deep, glassed-in balcony where wooden loungers were set out in a row, each with its folded red wool blanket and rubber pillow, while in front of us there sprawled a lavish view of jagged, snow-clad peaks that seemed to jostle each other rowdily in their eagerness to impress and charm. It was midday and staff and patients alike must have been at early lunch for not a soul was there save us two. Benny took the opportunity to smoke a clandestine cigarette, holding it corner-boy fashion in a cupped fist and stowing the ash in a pocket of his jacket. I have always envied smokers the little ritual they are allowed to indulge in twenty or thirty times a day, the lighting up, the long drag, the narrowed eye, the slow exhale. I tried to say something consoling to him but could think of nothing. Nor could I think why I had to be here—what was Madame Mac to me, or I to Madame Mac? Yet I had the impression of having been drawn despite myself into a kind of restive intimacy. Not only Benny had a filial aspect now, we both might have been a pair of grown-up brothers brought uneasily together at the bedside of a dying parent. Benny puffed and sighed, sighed and puffed, scanning the room as if in search of something that should be there but was unaccountably missing. Then he said a very strange thing, the import of which I did not understand,
and still do not. “There is no need for you to worry,” he said, frowning in the direction of my knees. “Everything will be all right.” How portentous he made those simple words sound. I nodded, still saying nothing. Why was he reassuring me, when he was the one who would shortly be bereaved? I might have asked, but did not. My unwillingness had something to do with the place, I think, the elevation, and that unnervingly neat row of extended chairs, and the big window tilting over us, and those preposterously picturesque mountains sparkling in the unreal noonday light.