He led her, or was led, round the side of the chapel, to a white-washed cube probably the hermit’s cell. They trod regardless through one or two rows of sprawling, droughty tomatoes and artichokes run to seed. Hero began calling reverently in Greek. On entering the silence, they found nothing except an iron pot upside-down on the uneven dirt floor.
‘Of course, at this hour,’ she became all tremulous smiles, ‘he will be at his prayers. I do not want to interrupt. But time is so precious.’
They led each other back, trampling through the artichokes and tomatoes. They were caught between the purple east, which would never open to them, and the burning west, the blaze of which they mightn’t be strong enough to endure.
Hero was calling tinnily in imitation of the convent bell. Blundering up the chapel steps he could sense they were wasting their time: there was a smell of cold candle droppings, and rotten woodwork, and general mustiness. All but one of the icons had been prised away from the crude iconostasis, and the eyes of the survivor gouged out: by Turks from across the channel? or the devils of Perialos? The sound of birds’ wings might have soothed; light might have furnished the abandoned chapel with a panopoly against corruption, if one remorseless spear hadn’t struck at a subsiding mound of human excrement beside the altar.
Hero was raging: her tongue looked like an ugly instrument in blunt rubber. ‘Are we lost? Do we come all this way for—
nothing?
Yes, of course we do; it is not so very extraordinary. Cosmas would have warned you: this hermit—who is dead, or gone—was a filthy old man—covered with oil-spots, and candle-wax. He wore his hair in a pigtail because he was too lazy to screw it into place, in its bun. He smelled sour—of urine, and cold beans. Cosmas said he had lice: he had seen them moving around, he said, on the
croûte
at the nape of his neck; but I would not accept that, much as I respect my husband.’
‘If you knew all this, what was the point in coming back?’
‘For the words he spoke—which I have never been able to remember—not their meaning—I hear only the sound of them.’
They were feeling their way back with their feet down the outside steps of the chapel; when she began to blubber hopelessly. ‘I think we have lost our faith in God because we cannot respect men. They are so disgusting. And cannot address one another—except mumbling.’
It was Hero who might have drunk the ouzo. She was drunk, but with her disillusion and helplessness. He tried to support her. Hadn’t she been his mistress, more than that, his creative source? He would have liked to point out the scaly sea, like a huge, live fish, rejoicing in its evening play, but he might have mumbled like the vanished saint. Perhaps if he could have done a drawing; but Hero only understood the visions of her own inferno.
They slithered hobbled down over rocks scratched by thorns whipped by avenging trees down past the convent everywhere silence except for dew dripping through dust on to dust down into the village which might have died in their absence if a dynamo hadn’t given it a pulse a lit doorway bursting into laughter a tree swelling and ejaculating.
They slept in their separate cells; or he lay on his iron bed, under a damp-smelling sheet, his eyelids flickering then rigidly open beneath what had been the ceiling: he could visualize Hero doing the same.
Next morning, while they were sitting below, over little cups of muddy coffee at a marble table, Hero asked: ‘When we will return to Athens, Hurtle, what are your plans? Will you continue your tour into Europe?’ She sneezed once or twice, because by now the convent cold had broken out in her too.
He should have felt ashamed chewing so ravenously at the crust of bread; but the bread was good; and the act allowed him time to appreciate his release. Fortunately Hero’s expectations weren’t excessive: round the café table there was an air of camping out. She looked listless, bloodshot, nicotine-stained. While she scratched her parting with unvarnished nails, he could afford to swallow down the last knot of half-masticated bread with complete naturalness. The last of the yellow crumbs fell from his lips and scattered down his chest. He knew he hadn’t bothered to wash the sleep out of his eyes: altogether, he must have looked this woman’s awful counterpart.
‘No,’ he said, shaking his head, half-choking on the swallowed bread. ‘I shall go back to Flint Street.’
‘So soon?’ She yawned. ‘It is not practical to come such a distance and waste the fare.’
He might have told her that, in his case, the only life he could recognize as practical was the one lived inside his skull, and though he could carry this with him throughout what is called the world, it already contained seeds created by a process of self-fertilization which germinated more freely in their natural conditions of flaking plaster, rust deposits, balding plush, and pockets of dust enriched with cobweb. If he didn’t try to tell her any of this it was partly because she wouldn’t have been interested, and because of certain apocalyptic moments on their journey to the other side of the island; though these too, might have been experienced in time amongst the broken glass and tarnished light, the empty chrysalides and dark, indestructible plants of the conservatory at Flint Street.
Hero had drunk her medicinal coffee down to the dregs. ‘I do not understand the mind of an artist. He is too egoist—too enclosed, ’ she said without any apparent resentment. ‘I am glad I am, in the end, dependent on nobody or nothing but myself.’
Because her final statement didn’t bear looking at, she avoided his eyes, his hand which continued to offer the conventional gestures of affection. After all, hadn’t they been flung together in the more humiliating figures of the trampoline? They had learnt the secrets of each other’s underclothes.
Hero pushed back her coffee cup, and raised her voice in self-defence. ‘Dependent not even on God. Not even on my husband. If I tell you I intend to remain in Athens, you will immediately think: “Ah, she is crawling back to Cosma!” I know he will take me if I wish. I have it in writing.’ She made a move towards her bag, but changed her mind. ‘I do not wish it. Nobody is responsible for me: least of all those I love—or worship.’
Forgetting she had finished it, she took a mouthful of her coffee, and now had to spit out the muddy dregs; however he remembered Hero, and there was still the return voyage to Piraeus, this might remain the key version: the black lips spluttering and gasping; the terrible tunnel of her black mouth.
‘
Dreck! Dreck!
The Germans express it best. Well, I will learn to live with such
Dreck
as I am: to find a reason and purpose in this
Dreck.
’
All this time a little golden hen had been stalking and clucking round the iron base of the café table, pecking at the crumbs which had fallen from their mouths. The warm scallops of her golden feathers were of that same inspiration as the scales of the great silver-blue sea creature they—or he, at least—had watched from John of the Apocalypse, ritually coiling and uncoiling, before dissolving in the last light.
‘See—Hero?’ he began to croak, while pointing with his ineffectual finger. ‘This hen!’ he croaked.
Hero half-directed her attention at the hen; but what he could visualize and apprehend, he could really only convey in paint, and then not for Hero. The distressing part was: they were barking up the same tree.
Their lack of empathy was not put to more severe tests because the proprietor came to the table. As he wiped the marble surface, he made some confidential remark in the language the ex-lover found he still resented.
‘Alitheia?’
Hero replied, craning.
‘He says,’ she explained, ‘the
vaporaki
has been sighted from the mole. Oh dear, I detest these departures, particularly from islands: there is little hope of recovering what one has left behind.’
The iron claws of the marble table vibrated on the ground as they pushed back their wobbly chairs.
‘Have you got the tickets?’ Hero gasped. ‘The keys—I must make sure—the keys!’
The golden hen flashed her wings: not in flight; she remained consecrated to this earth even while scurrying through illuminated dust.
7
At the smallgoods where he always bought his milk, the girl said: ‘Thought you’d knocked off the milk. Thought you’d gone on a diet, or something.’
‘I could have gone away, too. Or died.’
The girl didn’t understand it was meant to be a joke. She looked pleasantly serious, with her fresh face and moustache of perspiration beads. It was going to be a hot day.
‘No,’ he said, guiltily on account of his attempted joke. ‘There are times when I just don’t bother.’
‘You could have it delivered. Why don’t you have it delivered?’
The healthy humourless girl obviously had his interests at heart: she looked at him so earnestly.
‘I don’t want to. There are days on end when I don’t want to think about, I don’t want to be bothered with the stuff.’
The girl found it difficult to believe. ‘But an elderly gentleman like you ought to take care of himself.’
He laughed a rather metallic laugh, and looked to see whether there was a glass handy.
‘I’m fifty-five.’
‘That’s about what I’d have reckoned.’
He felt almost bound to take his revenge by seducing the smallgoods girl, only she might have been the kind who is hiding a crush on her grandfather.
‘And you can’t tell me you’re not a gentleman,’ she said in triumph, ‘because I know one when I see one.’
He knocked over the empty milk bottle he was returning, and the girl, realizing she was paid to conduct a business, began concentrating on the till.
‘After living the fifty-five years you so correctly dropped to,’ he told her, ‘I’ve reached the conclusion the only truth is what one overhears.’
The girl registered the sale. ‘Eh?’ She laughed, and the perspiration shot off her and landed on the clanging till. ‘You’ve got something there! I bet we’d hear a lot of dirty cracks!’
The early heat made him feel he wasn’t up to more, so he took his bottle of milk and went.
All through the streets there was already a hard, yellow glare. Old men, older than himself, were putting out garbage bins, rank with fat-trimmings, cabbage-spines and prawnshells. The singlets the old men were wearing exposed their veined arms, dark as stringy bark from the elbows down, skinny-white about the biceps. Women of all ages were going sleeveless on such a morning: their skins had the soapy, large-pored look; their hair was set too tight, either with brilliantine, or perspiration. What had started as an adventure, to move around freely inside your dress, almost nothing else on, was becoming a martyrdom as the blazing yellow lid was screwed tighter, and the women dragged from one station to the next.
In spite of what he saw around him, he felt at large. His clothes were still easy on him. His bare feet followed paths of unconsumed shade, enjoying the texture of the pavement. They were elegant for naked feet: long, fine-boned, unscathed by a lifetime of shoes. He found himself looking at them with such pleasure they should have been someone else’s; he might have grown cynical of his own complacence if he hadn’t caught sight of his hand.
Swinging a milk bottle by the neck in the green light from the pollarded planes, it became noticeable. His hands were beginning to give him away. They had started shrivelling, certainly only slightly, and only with a freckle or two, but which might become cancerous.
The freckled, in some cases, scabby, hands of the old men putting out garbage, trembled from their exertions. They immediately fumbled after tobacco: the cigarette paper, stuck to the lip, or held between papery fingers, stirred tinkling in the vestige of a breeze.
His disgust made him walk faster, no longer choosing the shady paths, stalking with white hatred across the burning asphalt. He had never been so relieved to reach 17 Flint Street. He bundled in, most inelegant, past the iron gate which dragged, under the araucaria: an elderly gentleman of fifty-five.
And how dead the house since he had gone out unsuspecting for milk: the interior smelled of age and dirt, no longer of cool, but of a sour, creeping damp. Worst of all, he had grown hostile to all these paintings since the chopper, in the innocent hands of the smallgoods girl, had descended on his own innocence. The paintings, the earlier ones you end by accepting like inherited moral traits, had withdrawn apathetically into the walls on which they were hanging. They were less humiliating, however, than the bravura of technique, the unsolved problems of space, the passages of turgid paint, which glared at him from the later ones standing around the skirting-boards. Most disturbing of all was the painting on the easel in his top-back studio-bedroom. Before his going out it had struck him as having a lucidity, an almost perfect simplicity: the essence of table and chair-ness of chair, which he had been trying to convey in the previous versions of his ‘Furniture’, all lost with his going out; the smallgoods girl, by performing a simple operation on his mind, had done away with the membrane separating truth from illusion.
In this throbbingly illusionless state, he realized the bottle of milk was growing hot in his tenacious hands. He left the appalling window which opened out of the easel on to his interior emptiness. He went downstairs so quickly the house shook; his bones were jarred. On arriving in the kitchen he found he must have left the milk in the bedroom, but would have had no taste for milky coffee; he drank a mouthful of cold black, pouring the rest of the poisonous stuff down the sink.
It was the heat. He was constipated, too: when a smooth velvety stool might have been the great rectifier; much more depended on the bowels than the intellect was prepared to admit.
Inside the vine-hooded dunny with its back to Chubb’s Lane, heat became a positive virtue, an assistance to the stiff pelvis. While he sat straining in the heat which was half smell, he noticed the aphorism he had started to scribble on the white-wash—must have been twenty-five years ago—and never finished: