When men are young they set out and see the world. Later, when they are older they must cast illusion aside.
“Beauty” is one such illusion.
As men grow older and acquire wisdom, which is after their fortieth year, they should be thinking of their woman and bride. They should spend much of their time in mountains. They should exert themselves greatly for the good of their house.
When I see a beautiful woman I feel pity for her.
IV
Sexual ecstasy is a veil. If you pursue it, know this at least, that it will lead you away from the pursuit of the One God and the One Love.
Life, as we all know, is decrepitude and descent into death.
Sexual desire is like a sail made of sweet-wrappers. It will not perform, but its making was sweet.
V
Hamlet was right, there is no better thing than lying between maiden thighs.
I listen to the maiden’s fluting voice whilst moonlight falls upon a bunch of dried flowers.
VI
I have never seen a forty-three-year-old man who is happy and constantly pursuing young beautiful women, unless he is a man of the world, concerned with matter and ownership and the outward shape of things.
Such a man will be satisfied as long as he gets the grand prize, a small clam situated in the region of the crotch. In return he will offer his local delicacy, a sausage-like thing with mayonnaise coming out the end.
VII
I am standing on a hill. Snow is falling, settling on my shoulders.
I see myself as extraneous in the human universe. Sometimes I wonder if I am not already living in a society that has dissolved? Insurance companies and banks send me letters, all inconsequential crap. I rip them into small pieces and put them in my painted waste paper basket from Rajasthan.
The world is full of Freudians. God damn the Freudians, with their dumb goatee beards like pig’s bristle on their weak chins.
I am a Jungian, standing on a hill, with frost settling on my shoulders. The fields are barren. I am barren too.
VIII
Could it be that there is some sort of shadow moving across my world, my life? Am I intrinsically flawed—a man with a design fault? Why, when things are in front of me, do I turn away, disdain them? I have turned my life into a struggle against rules I have imposed to bind myself?
IX
What does One Love mean?
Is it anything but idealization, the Love Object surrounded by dark shadows?
Have I chosen to live in One Love surrounded by encroaching shadows?
X
If I could kiss Gradisca’s lips today, if I could thrust myself into her innermost womb and expend myself there, would she turn into One Love? No, because One Love is invented myth. Most myths are spontaneous, true, and demotic. One Love does not keep company with other myths; it feeds on fatty, unwholesome soup. Its object is unreality.
XI
Everything is illusion. Life has no real meaning.
Heaven is a place invented by people too lazy to make their own.
I am sure there is no heaven except when I am lying in the arms of my darling, and tonight she is so very far away. It makes me feel alone.
I’m so fucking stoned I could die.
iii) The Night of San Giorgio
Earlier, the streets had been packed with people wearing black, the men with large wooden phalli, which they’d pointed enthusiastically at the women whilst singing crude, folkloric songs. Some had wrapped slices of lard around their carved phalli.
Now, by the dark of night, everyone wore white and carried candles whilst eulogizing the Lord. The priests were out in force. Tonight was the eve of San Giorgio. I’d been told by the drunks in the bar that this was a night when anything could happen. Watch out for the frustrated housewives, the young girls with hot thighs, they said. Tonight they were all wild, all the women!
Every man had to go out and be ready for the approach of his very own Pagan Queen. Many children were born nine months after San Giorgio, or at least that was what the wooden-phalli-guys told me, big grins on their faces.
At this precise moment I was standing under an awning outside a bar overlooking the main piazza. There was a marble fountain in the middle, filled with dry leaves and cobwebs. I looked up and saw Gradisca standing there, all dressed in white, her face terribly pale. I realized with a jolt that she was not happy. Across a sea of faces our eyes met; then we looked away, as if by magnetic resistance.
Could I possibly be mistaken? This woman looked too pale, and her hair was too short, too dark. Wasn’t this in fact Gradisca’s sister, the woman I knew from the ice cream bar?
Again and again I felt my eyes involuntarily sliding back, dwelling on her.
If I could have stepped forward and put my hand on Gradisca’s arm, the fantasy would have been dispelled. On the night of San Giorgio I would have overcome this thing that was consuming me.
Once or twice she threw a speculative glance in my direction, as if waiting for me, but somehow I couldn’t bridge the gap. All I could manage was to torpidly follow her as she moved off, disappearing into a crowd assembled before a stage, where a skimpily dressed dancer was performing a sort of erotic Egyptian dance, as if to goad her audience to orgiastic feats.
I stood there, searching for Gradisca. Could she really be this pale virgin I had seen? Gradisca was a gold-burnished creature in a blood-red skirt. All summer I had watched her long hair cascading in auburn luxuriance down her tapered back.
It was winter now. In some mysterious way she had redefined herself—put herself beyond my reach.
When the dance was over I walked back to my house and let myself in, waiting as the slow-starting fluorescent tube threw a white glare over everything. On the floor in the hall, a stray dog I had adopted stood up and put her tail between her legs. I stroked her and told her to stay in her basket. She licked my hand gratefully.
With heavy steps I climbed the stairs and got into my cold, damp bed.
iv) Epilogue
Somewhere inside of me there’s a little dark man, or maybe a large dark man.
Either way, he’s dark, and darksome. He feels something has been lost which will never again be found. In fact it is love that has gone; for the rest of his days he must go in search of it; even though it will never again be there, perfect and wholly possessed, in his hands.
This evening I walked through my town. The clouds were flying fast. The mistral came blowing in, and a sheet of light sea-mist slid over the top of the valley. The shops were lit, and on the rim of the horizon a dark halo seemed to be rising from the choppy sea, although the spume was almost luminous as the breakers came hissing in.
In the watch shop I saw a Greek chorus of women, all doe-eyed and intent on me as I glanced inside to catch a glimpse of Gradisca. She was wearing her dark blue jeans that show off her slightly disproportionate rump, offset by her shapely legs.
Gradisca was standing in an almost choreographed position, twisting at the waist to look out of the plate glass window, her legs like vines encircling a pillar.
The women knew I had come to look at her. I could hear their chorus chanting as I passed:
“Who is that sad, prowling man, and why does he make no attempt to come in? Why does he always walk past without waving at us, greeting us? Why does he look at us but never come in and have words with us? Does he think we are stones? See the darkling thrush, see those melancholy eyes! Beware, beware, for he has drunk from melancholic springs and courted fair Persephone!”
As I walked away I felt a deep sadness, as if something were dying inside of me.
Even so I doubled back and hovered round the piazza that Gradisca sometimes crosses on her way to and from the shop.
Driving rain whipped across the paving stones. The place was deserted. I waited under a palm tree, then decided to buy some red wine and steak and head back home.
At a corner of the piazza I crashed into Gradisca, in her raincoat and umbrella.
“Ciao,” she said breezily, as if I were no one in particular.
As she crossed the street and headed for the river, a late sun broke through the clouds. There was something almost heroic about her slight figure, clutching her shopping bags and rushing homeward under the swaying palms, through squalls of illuminated rain.
I had spent all this time dreaming about her, observing her. Now that I had seen her subsumed at last—looking to all intents and purposes like any other human being—I was left with a question in my mind, a question I might never be able to answer.
Who the hell was she?
WHEN SUSAN OPEN THE DOOR SHE LOOKED UTTERLY UNCHANGED, STILL WEARING THAT AIR HOSTESS UNIFORM AFTER ALL THOSE YEARS: a blue cotton/polyester skirt to her knees; black indistinct shoes with low heels; a white silk blouse; and a splash of Hermés scarf in case anyone should be so bold as to glance at her tubular white throat.
Also: that trademark smile, dazzling, slightly insincere.
“Robert, where have you been? Haven’t seen you for an absolute age! Come in!” She led me into her nondescript suburban Cambridge home, and I followed her down an intestinal corridor. “Earl Grey or Darjeeling?” she called out over her shoulder, on her way into the kitchen.
“I don’t suppose you have any of the non-smoked variety?”
“Ha! Now sit down and tell me everything.” Returning, she sank into a sofa, from which she surveyed me, crossing her hands in her lap. “Are you still keeping up with Jane?”
“Jane? Who’s Jane?”
“Jane. That girl doing philosophy, the one who lisped. I thought she was lovely.”
“Susan, that was twenty years ago.”
“Well some people do stay in touch, you know.”
“Jane is living in Rotterdam. Married to an optician, I think.”
“Sounds boring, the way you put it.” She wrinkled her nose, smiled. “Mind you, who am I to say anything? I live in a bungalow. I never imagined for one moment I would end up in a bungalow. Robert, I’m your classic spinster, although I still get men sniffing at me. I do everything you’d expect me to, and of course I’m far too middle class not to play bridge.” She stood up. “Now what about that tea? Or would you prefer something stronger?”
“I could have a gin.”
“Of course you could, Robert. Gin is one of life’s little survival kits.”
She walked over to a sideboard and mixed me a drink, adding a couple of ice-cubes. “What about your wife, what happened to her?”
“You know about my wife?”
“Robert, I know absolutely everything. It’s because I’m a letter-writer.”
“So you’ll know she left me, then. Or I left her.”
“People are terribly vague, aren’t they?”
“I suppose I made myself impossible. So she walked out on me while I was abroad. By the time I got back she’d already gone, taking most of the furniture. Made one feel it was a different house. No towels. Dust everywhere. Mattress on the floor. I grew to bloody hate London, I really did. That’s when I moved to the Languedoc.”
“Dear Robert must be the only person in the world who hated living in a nice comfortable Georgian house in London.”
“Oh I can assure you many people hate London, but it’s not actually London they hate at all.”
“What do they hate, Robert?” She laughed with that plaintive crystal sound of hers, like someone about to burst into tears. “Oh this is just like university! You haven’t changed a bit.”
“They hate themselves, Susan. People hate themselves, but they blame it on everyone else.” I stopped, and looked at her. “You seem quite happy. Content, really.”
“Oh I am. I love my life, small as it is, unimportant, all my dreams gone up in smoke. Dreams are enemies that come to us in our youth.”
I let that grand statement hang in the air, after considering it from all angles.
In the corner of my eye I sensed a movement at floor level. A kind of wobbling, lolloping motion. And then I saw it: A square, grey jellified lump propelling itself over the carpet, about the size of a small dog. It moved towards us, taking about a minute to cross the floor.
“Have you met Lumpa?” Susan asked. “My Japanese pet.”
“What is it?”
“He’s a kind of amoeba. A single-cell organism, they call it, which is rather a rude way of describing a living thing. I mean, we don’t refer to humans as bipeds, do we?”
“It doesn’t speak Japanese, I take it?”
“Don’t be silly. How would I communicate with it if it spoke Japanese?” She laughed. “I just mean it was invented in Japan.”
“Do you take it for walks?”
“Don’t be ridiculous! Lumpa would hate that. Lumpa likes to lounge around the house with me, watching television and reading books. Don’t you Lumpa?”
By now the thing had reached her legs, and was more or less wobbling against her ankles. Susan reached down and stroked its smooth skin. It trembled slightly when it sensed human contact. “This is the only thing that’s ever loved me,” she added. “And that includes you, Robert. Most men don’t like cuddling. You know that, being one yourself. In fact they’d rather not see you at all, unless they’ve got nookie on their minds.”
I looked away to avoid something pointed in her stare. Surely she did not think I had come for that?
Susan had obviously grown a bit strange in her isolation. Then, when I thought about it, I realized she’d always been strange. Before I could think of anything to say, she stood up. “I think it’s time for your lunch, isn’t it?”
I was overcome by dread at the thought of some ghastly comfort food lurking in her oven, and I was just about to open my mouth to signal that I had already eaten, when she disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a bowl and a whisk. She cracked two eggs into some milk, then whisked the mixture.
Lumpa had already begun moving towards me, the next available source of warmth. Thankfully once it sensed her coming back it stopped and lolloped back to her.
She patted it. “They’re very easy to feed, far easier than dogs or cats. They’re much more human, somehow; plus, no hair on the carpet.”