“Some do and some do not. If the whim takes them, I have had them write sonnets and essays here, but not all can spell. That is the sadness of it. Some scribble and splotch upon the paper. I have known them dig the nibs into the paper like claws.”
“It is a resting place between places?”
“There are such. You have the tongue for such things-the apprehensions. Are you from afar? You have not the London accent.”
He has stepped beyond, the floorboard creaking. In their brownness is ever a complaining. I skirt a trough of cheaper volumes such as housemaids read and enter where the green curtain stirs upon the frosted glass. The room within is long and narrow. It gives, as I thought, upon a window at the further end, where stand a small nonentity of trees, a larch, a willow, and an unknown. A wall beyond the small garden prevents their escape. They can neither come within nor steal back to their kind. Engravings for which I have no taste subdue the bright pink covering of the walls. An escritoire holds-still and small-paper, ink, and pen, upon it.
“Would you read? What would you read?”
He enters, closing the door upon us. To my left, facing the window, is perceived a staircase half hidden by an alcove.
“There is a room beyond-a living room. A room for living.”
His voice still speaks, but yet is tentative. The paper, pen and ink await me-menacing with unfulfilments.
Father said to me once, “Write down everything you think, upon the quick thinking of it-the first things you think,” and so I wrote. Beneath his gaze I wrote, “flowers and trees and birds and horses and fences, hedges and doves, quick in their coming.”
Father looked at it and said, “No, that is not what you think, not what you think at all. It is not the innerness of what you think. Write deeper what you think. Write of what is beyond the paper and the ink, between the pen nib and the paper's gap, there capture what you think,
Nel' mezzo del camin di nostra vita
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
Che la dirita via era smarita.
“You comprehend?”
“ Vita is life. Is it of life?”
I stare at the writing as if it would speak to me. Thus have I seen others read who take as long to absorb a sentence as I a novel.
“In the middle of the journey of our life, I found myself in a dark forest and the way was lost.”
He has translated. The sadness of the words pours upon me as water upon rocks. It is the beginning of Dante's great poem, I am told, but the words need no identification. They come from the hollows of eternity. Perhaps we have all written them in different forms, but lacked the music and the orchestrations, the deft pavane of syllables well placed, not put upon by meanings other than their own. Listening to my silence, he reads the words now in Italian. They dance and ring upon my mind as if padded hammers were playing upon thin bars of metal such as, when placed side by side, are called a xylophone. Oscura. I would make myself thin and small, make myself unto the stalk of a leaf, and wriggle like a tadpole through the “o” to find the sad dark of which the poet wrote.
His eyes regard me as I stand alone. “It is best that we go in now.”
“Very well.”
The door by the staircase-the door previously hidden from my view-is opened unto me. I enter a drawing room of smallish aspect by my standards, yet neat and clean. Laying down a book too small for comfort, a woman rises, firm of body in her rising, brown of dress and brown of eyes. Her hair has a steely glint that somehow comforts. I take her age to be as his. Her skin is smooth, untrodden yet by crows.
“She may have tea. There is no reason that she should not have tea. Did you find a reason, Thomas? No? It is as I suspected. Very well.”
He bows as might a servant and is gone. A chair is indicated to me. I am weighed up, found to be alive, of good presence. I remove my bonnet and replace the long pin slowly. I have been by the sea, flown where the seagulls fly, spoken with mariners, and hidden in my depths. Father nibbled my bare toes once, as might a fish. There were cockles to be had in Brighton. I must return there. It is shown by the shape of the horizon. I have learned much yet am ever too much contained within myself, trapped in arteries, enclosed in flesh, my hands belonging and yet not belonging to my being.
“Are you frivolous, inactive? Do you become inert?”
She has come to the heart of the matter, I think, though whether in the first part of her question or the second, I do not know.
“I think not, Madam.” I am careful to answer her softly. The windows of her eyes are veiled. I know the razor of her thoughts-the cutting edge of her mind.
“Have you been in private service?”
“I prefer private service. It is received and given, is it not?”
The tea is brought-a kettle permanent, no doubt, upon a hob. A cousin of mine, one elderly, untried, untrodden, was given to such eccentricities in winter, whether one drank or not. In summer she would fill the kettle with flowers, even to several protruding through the spout, for she said that the kettle would become sad if it felt that it were not in use. Upon killing a fly she would say a small prayer for her salvation, believing that the fly was a messenger of the devil who had been sent in some way or other to tempt her. How dried she looked-her skin withered. Upon my confessing to my aunt what had passed on my road to perdition, she said that I might have become such had I not been put to the probing of the bubbling manstalk, which she said had enriched my skin, caused it to become creamy and silky to the touch, and soothed with ardent boldness the hemisphere of my bottom.
“Upon the lowering of your drawers, Laura, you were brought to fruition.” So my aunt counselled me, and upon breathe, understand, and yet perhaps have no comprehension of. Let incomprehension be your understanding.”
I remained silent for I did not wish him to know how dull my mind lay in those moments. I sat silent at my writing desk while he, standing at my back, loosed my hairpins one by one with his fingers, fumbling and delving as one might for trinkets lost in grass until my hair was loose and cascaded in its brownness to my shoulders. Then, reaching across my back, he drew towards me a slender blue vase wherein that morning had been placed a single rose and bent my face until I had absorbed its scent, the silent message of its being. Then he pulled back my head so that tears started of a sudden in my eyes and, from beneath the paper I had been writing on, drew out a sheet upon which earlier he had written in French.
“Les vices de l'homme contiennent la preuve…de son gout de l'infinie…C'est dans cette depravation du sens de l'infini que git, selon moi, la raison de tous les exces coupables.”
“Do you understand, Laura?” father asked. “The words are Baudelaire's, but the sense of them is yours-the sense within you.”
I am slow in reading foreign tongues, having some understanding of French and but a smattering of Spanish. I sniffed at the words as a hound does in picking up its quarry. I followed them at a lope and trod across the riverbeds of dots.
“Oui, je comprends, Papa,” I said at last.
Perhaps he felt I had not and felt sorry for me and so translated slowly and aloud: “Man's vices contain the proof of his inclination towards the infinite. In my view, this depravation of the sense of the infinite contains the reason for his culpable excesses.” So having translated, father murmured to me that I might perhaps then write and left me.
Half an hour later when he returned to my room the paper lay blank still for my mind had turned about and about and yet I could find nothing to say. Indeed it was as if my head were inhabited by thousands of tiny beings all reaching their hands towards me and imploring me to remember their names, yet such was the clamour that I could hear none. I trembled that father would pick the paper up and turn it over in trust of finding some esoteric phrase beneath, yet he but lifted it, gazed long at it, and returned it precisely to its place.
“In this emptiness, this pool of white, this sheet unmarked by hand or pen, you have expressed yourself better, Laura, than Baudelaire, for he was forced to words, the production of symbols, a conglomeration of letters wherewith to form words, the pinings of thought and the pinings of expression.”
