The Solitary Twin
Other Books by Harry Mathews
fiction
The Conversions • Tlooth • Country Cooking and Other Stories The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium • Cigarettes Singular Pleasures • The American Experience • The Journalist Sainte Catherine • The Human Country: New and Collected Stories My Life in CIA
poetry
The Ring: Poems 1956–1969 • The Planisphere • Trial Impressions Le Savoir des rois • Armenian Papers: Poems 1954–1984 Out of Bounds • A Mid-Season Sky: Poems 1954–1991 Alphabet Gourmand (with Paul Fournel) • The New Tourism
miscellanies
Selected Declarations of Dependence • The Way Home Écrits Français
nonfiction & criticism
The Orchard: A Remembrance of Georges Perec • 20 Lines a Day Immeasurable Distances • Giandomenico Tiepolo Oulipo Compendium (with Alastair Brotchie) The Case of the Persevering Maltese: Collected Essays
for Ann Beattie
1
Berenice Tinker says, “When wine is to your taste, it has a becoming effect on you. You shine through your reticence,” to which Andreas Boeyens replies, “You’re modest, darling. It isn’t the wine.” “Thank you for your recent attentions; but I’m talking about something real, like a measurable physical effect.” “See what I mean?” “Please, no slick flick dialogue. Do you not drink sourpuss martinis to ‘mortify a taste for vintages’?” “Then no quality-lite bites either.” “If you insist.”
Later that evening, Berenice: “I garbled my thought. I told you I met John today. He lectured me sweetly about feelings for so long I lost touch with what the word means, at least until you unforeseeably slid into my bed. Actually not so unforeseeably, I’ve since realized.” “The hots at first sight?” “Happily so. However, I once saw a picture of you with your sister in a gossip mag. We are decidedly the same type.” “You are nothing like my sister. You are absorbingly new to me.” “Maybe. A feeling, perhaps?” “And have you seen my anticipatory sibling?” “I wondered. No brother. But your hair is the color of the gigantic poodle that belonged to Uncle Dom. When I was still an infant, it used to make me weep tears of terror whenever we visited him. As you approached, your lovely ginger hair filled me with darkest emotion. That must do for the time being.” “Charming! Sweet John, really! Just what else did he say to you?”
Berenice and Andreas, too foolish to sense the truth, were blessed with something of utmost price: a happiness beyond what either of them had ever imagined. They were sitting in Berenice’s house above the town. A strange town. For years it had survived as an extenuated fishing village of immemorial origin. Then, in the 1870s, it had started building itself deliberately (if inexplicably) into a settlement many times its size, in accordance (no less inexplicably) with a layout evoking the frugal plans of medieval towns more than the optimistic spreads of the late nineteenth century. Houses, shops, an inn, a market place, two churches, two bars, and a few public eateries were bonded together in a cluster occupying less than seventeen acres. Around the top of this area ran a road that proved as solid a barrier as any town wall of old: there was never any question of expanding beyond it, fair as the land there became, and free of danger. The coast of the bay mainly displayed jagged outcroppings of laminated schist; inland rose hills of soft-green vegetation punctuated occasionally with stands of beech, maple, and feathery conifers. A few hundred yards from the town one came upon large houses, often faced with yellow brick and fitted with multiple windows, whose purpose, one guessed, was to allow their occupants to feast their eyes on the green space around them, a prospect that even the best-appointed houses of the mother-town could never provide. It was one of these pleasant dwellings that Berenice had rented two days after her arrival.
Berenice: “You must realize that my hypothesis reflects a professional weakness, a penchant for cracking open every nut for study. This was only the first squeeze of the nut cracker. The next one may reveal, if not a chief jewel, at least something more acceptable to you. John said nothing to suggest the hair of the dog. He wanted to persuade me that feelings are our only reality . . .” “How delicious!” “. . . our only currency. Speaking our feelings and not what we think we ought to say is our only way of speaking truthfully. He quoted some poet (I’m not breaking my promise, just reporting his words), ‘And I see in flashes / what you already said, / that our feelings are our facts’.” Andreas groaned. Berenice: “What’s the harm in that? John hasn’t an ounce of malice in him.” “Your word is my rule.” “What about Paul? You mentioned finding him?”
“At last! I’d gone for a ramble through the fish markets, which were gleaming with fresh catch and crowded with buyers and flaneurs, even though it was early on a Sunday morning. I recognized Paul at once — I recognized a twin. He was standing among a small group of locals gathered around a steaming pot half as big as an oil drum, from which a vendor was spooning out small blobs that his customers swallowed with relish. I could not identify them until I was close by: baby octopuses boiled in their broth. I ate two. To no one in particular I offered to provide a bottle of white wine to complete our pleasure. There was a murmur of assent. I soon returned from the nearest hostelry with a bottle of muscadet and half a dozen glasses. After identifying ourselves, Paul went off to buy himself a pint of McEwan’s (he told me he had no liking for wine), and I went with him. I insisted on paying for his beer; it was a welcome occasion to introduce
