The Brooke-Rose Omnibus (12 page)

– No, that’s true.

– Goodnight.

– Goodnight.

During the hammering the conversation takes the form of the hammering, which has the high-pitched ring of metal hammer on metal chisel. Lost high-pitched words lurch
suddenly
into a lower key whenever the hammering stops.

– if you don’t mind.

– No, I don’t mind.

– … big idea?

– I don’t know, but it’s all got to be taken up, Mr.
Swaminathan
said.

– Hey, stop hammering when you talk. I can’t hear you.

– Mr. Swaminathan said it’s all got to be taken up, and that wall’s going to be knocked down too.

– Yeah, I heard, but why all …

– I suppose the bathroom alone isn’t big enough.

– Hey? Stop hammering. You’ve got no …

– I know, I’ve been told that before. I can hear myself though, and I can hear you through my hammering.

– … Vocational Training.

– Surely you’re too young to have gone through the Resettlement Camp?

– What you talking about? Stop hammering. What Resettlement Camp?

– I thought you said you’d had Vocational Training.

– Voice training, stoopid. I don’t usually do this kinda work, I’m a anger. They like us as singers, you know. Quaint you see, oldey worldey.

The hammering has the high-pitched ring of metal on metal, one hammer hitting the chisel on the beat, the other slightly off the beat. The voice is completely audible through the hammering and is charged with an aggressive gaiety not at all present in the languorous snarl of the speaking voice. The gaiety is not infectious.

The long metal chisel is hammered in some fifteen
centimetres
under the pink marble slab. The size of the pieces into which the marble slab breaks varies in direct ratio to the angle at which the chisel is held from the floor. The more
horizontally
the chisel can be held, the larger the pieces. But the chisel can be held horizontally only when inserted either, as at the Start, from inside the edge of the sunken bath, or, as now, from a side where another slab has already been
removed
, so that the chisel is being held at a level with the under-flooring. Between two slabs the chisel must be held almost vertically and tapped very gently into the dividing line. The singer does not tap gently.

– … get to the wall, then it won’t be so easy.

– Oh I don’t know, they’ll be free of access on one side.

– Stop hammering I can’t hear a word you say.

– I said they’d be free of access on this side. The really hard ones were the first.

– Yeah and I did more’n you did of those.

The singer holds his chisel obliquely and cracks the slabs into smaller pieces. He pauses a great deal.

– I wonder what they’re gonna do with all those pieces.

– I don’t know. A pink terrace in crazy pavement, perhaps.

– Stop hammering you old loony.

– A pink terrace in crazy pavement.

– Say, you’re in the know, ain’t you? Who you in with?

– That’s a very good question. I congratulate you on –

– What you saying?

Mr. Swaminathan stands in the pink marble bathroom and sways gently from one foot to another. Mr. Swaminathan paces up and down the pink marble bathroom, counting his own steps. The foreman does not pace up and down but advances cautiously from one two-metre distance of his measuring-rule to the next. He is a tall Asswati, taller and handsomer than Mr. Swaminathan. He has delegated the crouching measurements around the bath and coppershell washstands to the young Colourless worker who hums as he measures, but apparently jots nothing down. The bathroom measures about six metres by eight by four. It is bare of towels, sponges, soaps, jars, bottles, pots, brushes. The rails and racks for these things merge into the pink marble walls or floor, imperceptibly breaking their surface with hollows and curves. Mr. Swaminathan’s eyes strike an atonal chord. The
bathroom
window, at eye level, is about two metres wide, and half a metre high, almost wholly filled with a sky intensely blue. From this position, three steps away and to the left, only the distance to the right can be seen, the sea of olive groves and the Settlement of dark brown shacks like flies regimented on a flat patch of ground. Just beyond the Settlement the town sprawls in a sunlit haze, tall where it is not squat, grey where it is not golden.

– with the wall, d’you think? I’m talking to you.

– I’m sorry, Mr. Swaminathan. I was trying to pick out my house.

– Yes, well I haven’t got all day. Hmm. You-er-live in the Colourless Settlement? I gather the bungalows are very
comfortable
. One per mated capita now, isn’t it? That’s a
wonderful
improvement. There’s nothing like that in the town, well I suppose you know, the overcrowding there is insoluble. And as for the big cities –

– Gee, I know some people’d call ’em shacks.

– Well, that’s a matter of opinion. They were built by Colourless people in the first place, weren’t they, admittedly a very long while ago, for holidays, before the er –

– Well says the tall Asswati foreman I think we’d better leave them to get on with it and deal with the wall when my two builders come back. After all the marble has to be
removed
before it’s knocked down.

Mr. Swaminathan’s eyes strike an atonal chord, confusing the neural cells which complain by discharging a high mad microvoltage. It is not, however, his eyes which do this but the memory of his eyes having possibly done so, or the psychic presence, now hammered into by the high-pitched ring of metal hammer on metal chisel. A recording engineer might perhaps separate the components of the mixture. If the
hammering
were extracted, the lost sentences that came and went and returned in reconstructed form might be recovered and heard. The internal conversation, however, is too intimately compounded with the sentences that came and went to be separated by mechanical means. Except perhaps by
bombardment
with beta-particles.

– Well I’m tired, I guess we can have a rest now.

– But we’ve only done a fraction of it.

The marble slab has come away entire, without breaking at all.

– Hey, have you seen the view from this window? We’re quite high up, considering.

– Considering what?

– Oh, I dunno. Considering it’s a bathroom and all.

– Don’t you think we should try and get as far as that wall? They’re always accusing us of being lazy. Mr.
Swaminathan
might come up any minute.

– Say, you’re a dadda’s boy, ain’t yer? Mr. Swami this and Mr. Swami that. You got a yen for him or what? You listen to me, you gotta go slow, go slow in everything you do for ’em, otherwise it’s a mug’s game. What’s all this for, anyway?

– Mr. Swaminathan said something about a hair-dressing salon for guests at the big ball.

– Did he now? Big ball, eh? Hey, there’ll be extra servants needed, won’t there, butlers and drink servers, you know, circulating. And hairdressers, right here in the pink marble. Well, hairdressers’ assistants anyway. D’you think we’d stand a chance?

– I thought you said you were a singer?

– Yeah, well, not exactly. I go to night-school, see. I’m waiting for the big time. I take on jobs like this ’cos I can keep my voice in while I work. Oh boy when the big time comes! It’s all a question of luck. Being heard at the right moment by the right person. That’s discovery.

– You mean you’d sing while handing out champagne or shampooing ladies’ hair?

– Well. You never know. Oh boy, to get my fingers
lathering
and scratching in all that thick black hair. D’you think they’d take me on?

– I don’t know, what are you registered as?

– Yes, what are you registered as?

– Oh, hi-yer boss. We were just having a wine-break. No wine though.

– I asked, what are you registered as?

– I’m all things to all men I guess.

– Don’t be impertinent. You’re nothing to me and you may as well go.

– Oh now look here, boss –

– I said go. Wait downstairs in my office for your wages up till now.

The pieces of marble are strewn all over the floor. It is essential to pick them up and pile them in the corner which has already been demarbled. Some are triangular, some are trapeze-shaped, some are just small chips. One is a whole rectangular slab, which came away entire.

– Now then. Can you cope by yourself for the time being?

– Yes, I think so.

– Bad lot, that one. He not only won’t work himself but prevents others from doing so. It was the same in the pavilion. Delinquent of course.

– He told me –

– Yes, I expect he did. Well it all comes to the same thing in the end. What did you say you were registered as?

– Well, er, if you’ll excuse my saying so, I’m all things to all men too.

– It’s all a matter of tone, isn’t it. You’re all right. You’re a serious chap, you seem to grasp the nature of reality. You know, it’s not so easy for us as you may think. All privilege brings its inhibitions and the privilege of health is no
exception
. There’s an irrational fear that lingers on, it’s
understandable
, and in some cases justifiable. I just thought I’d mention it.

The conversation is real, repeat real. Sometimes it is
sufficient
merely to desire intensely. The law is known as the attraction of opposites.

– The law is known as the second law of thermodynamics, namely, that warmth cannot flow from a cold to a hot body, from a weak body to a strong, from a sick spirit to a healthy spirit, without the application of external circumstances.

It is sometimes sufficient to say nothing, or in this instance to stop the gentle throwing of marble pieces on to the pile of variously shaped slabs in the corner, for the sequence to continue.

– It is thus very difficult for the strong to love the weak, and for the healthy to love the sick, since no warmth is
received
from them or for that matter needed. The energy radiated from the strong can only flow into the weak in the form of temporary pyrexia, or even hyperpyrexia, which makes them weaker and sicker until dead cold, because it cannot flow back. You understand, don’t you?

– Mr. Swaminathan, you don’t have to explain.

– Sometimes it is kinder to explain at the beginning. It may prevent a tumorous growth.

– You mean in the imagination?

– Imagination is not an organ, it is a function. And when you recall this conversation, remember also that memory is not a place in the brain but a function of neural energy. So much energy is wasted through friction, dissipated,
d
isorganised
, it is important to preserve what there is, otherwise all molecular motions of love would be random ones, unable to impart uniform motions to other atoms. Then the universe would die, of maximum entropy.

– The diagnosis, however, would be a post-mortem.

– There you go again with your sick talk. Some people think that cold Colourless bodies should be done away with, to protect the universe, you know. But I am not such an absolutist. For one thing, it’s unscientific. What did you say you were before the – er displacement?

– I was a humanist.

– I didn’t mean your politics. They didn’t see you very far, anyway, did they? I meant your identity. Oh well, it doesn’t matter, identity is only an instrument after all.

– Mr. Swaminathan, I want to ask you one small thing. And that is, well, if you could, once a day, when I pass you on my way up here, just once a day, nod to me. It would help me so much, it would help to confirm my existence. This swaying of yours, you see, it’s such a negative sort of gesture.

– Well I will give the matter my consideration. It may not be very wise. Obsessions feed on so little. You are evidently still seeking that external circumstance. But then after all it might be a matter of common courtesy, you being here in this house, working. Perhaps really it would be kinder to sack you.

The feeling is one of euphoria. The veins in the pink marble leap out like a white network made to catch falling eyes. Existence takes the form of the hammering, which has the high-pitched ring of metal hammer on metal chisel. Identity is only an instrument, a hammer for example, hammering a metal chisel. Two instruments, to be precise, or one
instrument
and its objective. The gesture of work is its exactitude. It is important to hang on to that. The white veins in the pink marble tremble and nod, they sway and stretch out to catch the excited atoms. An oscillograph might perhaps reveal whether the hammering which now drives its high-pitched ring of metal on metal into the neural cells also drives into the memory of the conversation, memory being a function, not a place. An electroencelograph might perhaps separate the components of the conversation into the elements of silence, reality and unreality. A recording engineer might then dub the unreality with the hammering, if of course the
hammering
is not already part of the mixture. The piece of marble has broken into a shape exactly like the Matterhorn pink on a picture postcard. That the physical presence has occurred is not in doubt, for the visual image, though rapidly fading, is more distinct than in other circumstances, whereas the psychic presence is less strong than it is when there has been no physical presence, less engulfing, not engulfing at all. It is difficult, however, to be equally certain about the
conversation
, despite the ringing echo of certain phrases, such as the swaying, you see, protects me from levitation, which is unscientific. Did Mr. Swaminathan say, or did he not, the swaying, you see, protects me from levitation, which is unscientific?