Lucia

by Alex Pheby

  Now the elastic band on his underpants is cutting, so he opens the drawer in the bedside table and takes out a tub of moisturising cream. He pulls down his pants, turns onto his good side and, with two fingers of cream, begins massaging the thick skin on his hip bone.

  It is coming up to six o’clock.

  In some of the images, a recurrent group was visible – perhaps they were the family. In the first scenes they faced her, but later they turned their backs and held their hands away from her until they no longer appeared and her only contact was with the priesthood and the scorpion goddess Ta-Bitjet, wife of Horus son of Ra, the blood from whose conjugal deflowering is proof against poisoning (since Horus was almost killed from scorpion stings as a child).

  And join your limbs together, that you may endure

  The deceased speaks – ‘I have been given my mouth so that I may speak with it in the presence of the Great God.’

  THE BA OF LUCIA JOYCE

  PORNICHET AND NORTHAMPTON, JANUARY 1941 ONWARDS

  It is coming up to six o’clock. When is he going to get up?

  It is imbecilic to lie beneath the earth. What is he doing under there? What is there to do? Watch through the soil the goings on above?

  If he is the centre of the world, and he is beneath the surface at a distance of six feet, then he is only a distance of six feet from any point on the surface. This much is demonstrable in calculus and hence must be true if the propositions are true, which they all are (check them). Therefore, it is irrelevant whether he is interred in Zurich, or Dublin, or Paris, or Trieste, or on the banks of the river Nene. He can never be more than six feet away, and why send a letter? Don’t they have telegrams in Switzerland? They have them in France. In France it is even possible to find a friendly acquaintance to deliver news on one’s behalf – one telephones that acquaintance (one who lives closer to the recipient of the news than the one who has news to deliver) and asks politely whether that acquaintance wouldn’t mind awfully popping in to tell someone. That is if the someone doesn’t have a phone of their own, or isn’t under the care of some person or organisation that possesses a phone that may be rung very easily, and if you have a sore finger just ask to speak to the operator; they’ll put you through.

  Or send a telegram.

  To open a newspaper – something that Lucia is encouraged to do, after all, it is not good to dwell on matters internal indefinitely, there is a world outside the confines of your own skull, outside the walls of the garden, on the other side of closed eyelids, keep in touch with current affairs – and discover news that you ought properly to have heard from the horse’s mouth is distressing. Can it be dismissed as a mistake?

  Editors of newspapers make mistakes every day – there is even a section in the newspaper which lists and then apologises for the various mistakes that have been made in the previous day’s edition. If you ever have any specialist knowledge of this or that matter and then you read an article in a newspaper on the same topic you are always amazed at how inaccurate the content of these articles is. They often have even the general gist wrong. So why would anyone believe a word of it?

  In the garden there is a small, round, cast-iron table painted white. You can easily run a finger around the edge of it – one circle – without stretching. It is not solid, but latticed. While the index finger of the right hand cannot quite make it through the holes, the little finger can, up to the second knuckle, but you must take it out before the finger goes red, then blue, and eventually white.

  Beside the table there is a cast iron chair, too heavy to lift easily if you wish to shift position, but if you call over someone to help, it can be done. If you ever observe another woman who has sat on this chair, if she is wearing shorts in the summer, if she has sat there for some time staring down the garden, then, when she gets up, you can see the pattern of the lattice that makes up the seat of the chair on the backs of her legs in red. This pattern is the same as the pattern on the table.

  On the table there is a porcelain cup and a saucer in which mint tea is cooling, and there is a pastry, untouched. There are cigarettes and matches. This is in the summer, though. At that time of year there is a newspaper there, too, to one side. In the winter you can stare from the upstairs window at this table, and remember the backs of women’s legs, and the smoking of cigarettes, and the weight of cast iron, and compare it to the tray you place on your lap as you sit on the edge of the bed, and on which there is no room for the paper. That is placed on the writing table all the way over on the other side of the room facing the wall on which there is a picture of another garden in which there is no iron table and chair, nor any women, but which does have a pond.

  —Have you read the paper yet?

  There are all sorts of thoughts that go through your head that need not be expressed despite the urgency with which they are felt. Ought not, in fact, be expressed if there is any hope for a manageable existence in the world. If you are addressed even in the politest terms, it can produce thoughts that are violent – violent in form, violent in content, violent in style – these thoughts ought to remain thoughts, and not come out into the world as actions.

  —Not yet.

  —Well, remember, there is a world outside one’s own head and it’s always wise to keep abreast of current affairs.

  So much is certainly true. If you imagined it was not true then the number of times you have heard this repeated, the weight of the words as they pile up over years, would force you to reappraise your denial of these facts. Why else would they be said so often?

  A bed is a very comfortable place, and if you stretch out your legs and lay the tray on your lap and sip at the coffee which is served today in a shallow bowl around the edge of which swallows beat their wings, provided the pillows are sufficiently plumped, it is a very pleasant experience. You do not have to strain to see the garden; the window is right there. While there is no snow, the sky is white and grey and heavy, and there is every possibility that there will be snowfall by the evening. Then, when you move to the window after supper and look out, the lights from the rooms below will illuminate the untouched snowfall in squares of flickering orange and yellow. The silhouettes of the trees will be heavy. If you do etchings, the white lines are very important, and these trees will look like that – white lines contrasting with the black silhouettes to give an effect that…

  —I’ll be back in a little while for the tray.

  What does the absence of something look like?

  What does the lack of a telegram on a tray look like?

  If the tray is wood, it looks like wood. If the tray is melamine, it looks like melamine. And what does the absence of something sound like? If it is the movement of an attendant in the hall and quiet conversation in the next room then it sounds like that. If it is the sound of blood rushing in the ears and the pause between the beating of the heart then it sounds like static, like a poorly tuned wireless, like the numb, waterlogged sensation in the inner ear when one receives a blow one is not expecting, right across the cheek with a flat hand, but which also drives air at the ear drum and perforates it if you are unlucky.

  How does the absence of news feel? Like nothing, in the experiencing of it, but later, when one looks back and thinks, after the storm has passed and the snow has stopped falling and morning is here on the twenty-third, but of which month you aren’t quite sure, then it feels very unusual. It feels like idiocy. It feels like betrayal. It feels like an innocent time that has been proven to be a lie and the pleasures of which must now be shied away from forever. No such pleasure would have been possible if the news had been delivered: it would have punctured it like an inner tube is punctured by a glass shard from a discarded bottle knocked from a window sill in the early morning. If you imagine by a cat mewling to be let in that makes you one sort of person. If you imagine by an angry lover trying the locks that makes you another. You are punctured either way and flat and useless. You are a burden to be repaired before normal service can be resumed.<
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  The newspaper is there on the writing desk, and you’ve always thought that there was something perfect about a nicely folded newspaper, something redolent of civilisation’s triumph over chaos that war and death and tragedy can be rendered so affectless. Somewhere you’ve heard of butlers ironing newspapers before presenting them to their masters and this is very good. It is not sufficient to take the suffering of others, reduce it to ink, and present it in absolute order in columns on a page; you must also find a way of making one man serve another man to the extent that he will spend his time heating an iron on the fire in the early morning. He will lick his finger and hear it hiss when he applies it timidly to the flat, then let the metal cool until it will not scorch or make the ink run, and then make perfectly flat what is already flat. He will then process to the other man’s room with the paper held in front of him while all the time he could be eating, or shitting, or paying these attentions to the people of his own life.

  You have always thought this, Lucia, but when you open that paper today, if you ever sip the coffee, now cold, to completion and replace the bowl with the swallows on the tray and remove the tray from your knees and place it on the bedside table and take the few steps over to the writing table where the paper is folded, if you ever do that, you will not be able to think it again. There are things you can read in that paper that will make affect of the affectless, and no amount of flatness of tone, or style, or coldness of delivery will render those words painless for you. For you alone. This should not be the first word you hear on the subject. What option do you have but to consider it a mistake?

  Your father is dead.

  In the spring there is a surprising amount of rubble in the garden and the windows have been boarded up. As the dandelions sprout on the lawn two terribly skinny gentlemen come and take first the cast iron table and then the cast iron chair. You can watch their slow and halting progress if you press your cheek up to the glass by the gap between the boards and turn your gaze as far to the outside as you can. Even though it’s warm, your breath mists the glass, and when they put the table down to catch their breath and to rub their hands you use your tongue to draw in the condensation – you attempt a flower, but the tip of the tongue is a clumsy paintbrush. It’s no better than a child could manage.

  A baby.

  There are no newspapers now, except the one you remember, and no pastries, and no mint tea. What little you are given is often stale, even the water, which leaves your throat dusty, and your stomach flat. This is a blessing because there’s nothing worse than feeling full when you are empty, is there?

  —If you hear anyone, anyone at all, you will stay absolutely silent, do you understand?

  There is a difference between understanding and acquiescing. There is a difference between doing what you are told and agreeing to do what you are told. There is a difference between staying silent and having absolutely nothing to say. In that difference you occupy yourself with memories – the lattice-work patterns on the backs of women’s legs.

  —What is there to say?

  The images on the newspaper and the gathering of rubble in the garden, the generation of seed heads on the dandelions and the noises in the street, the haunted expressions on the faces of the attendants and the dusty water, it all means something. What that something means is impossible to say.

  There have been no visitors for as long as you can remember. There have been no phone calls and no telegrams and no letters. If you have visitors it is possible to express the things you have to say and cross-reference them with what you expect their reactions to be against the reactions that they actually make. You can then listen, very carefully, to the things they say in reply to the things you have said to them, and clarify what is going on in the world. If there are no visitors this is very difficult.

  Days and months and years, possibly, seasons certainly, drift past in ways that are both extremely fleeting and excruciatingly drawn out depending on how much attention you choose to pay, which is increasingly little since there doesn’t seem to be any reward for it.

  If death was possible, would it be desirable?

  Your world has become very small, not that it ever extended much beyond your range of vision and hearing. The range of experiences that are experienced within that range of vision and hearing is itself restricted – the boards, the corridor, the bathroom, the newspaper – so much that the absence of things is very much more significant in its draw on your attentions than the presence of things. Where is x? Where is why? Y can’t we go into the garden?

  Keep your voices down.

  In autumn, the faces you recognise are replaced with faces you do not recognise and they do not recognise you. To them you are an object which requires remedial work – cleaning, delousing, feeding, accounting for. There are questions to which the answers are lost, or of significance that is not obvious, or to ends that you already know are dead, and beneath the ground he is watching you.

  You pick up the bowl with swallows and it is warm now against the oncoming chill. Though the garden is filled with leaves and rubble, a wooden table has been placed there and a wooden chair. They are both constructed from pale, untreated wood, but which is sanded. When you run your finger around the square the wood does not splinter. Though the edges are rough, the flat of the table is smooth, not solid, being made from slats of wood which would stripe the arse if you sat on the chair with shorts, though it is too cold for that.

  If you smoke indoors the room soon fills up, and you can’t open the window, and quick! turn off the light. The atmosphere in there gets cloying. It is better to sit in the garden and smoke, and perhaps sip wine and make conversation with beautiful younger women, and watch the swallows swoop and dart and keep low to the grass.

  Keep your head down.

  It is even better to sit by the river and watch the boats. Even better to be on the boat, watching the shore and smoke until you are sick. If you eat very little, and what you do eat you spit into your handkerchief, too many strong cigarettes can make you retch when taken with wine, though over the side of a boat, who cares? Who’s watching? He doesn’t care.

  Indoors, though, if you move a picture to the side, one with an image in it, to see what’s behind, it’s not what you think. Instead it is a patch of paler colour, as if someone has come in with a brush and determined to paint behind everything you have hung on the walls a lighter, less brown shade. Even behind the mirror, cracked now since it fell from the wall in the night. When you woke there was a lot of noise in the corridor, a lot of anxious whispering and running around. There was the sound of broken glass being swept up, as if all the mirrors in all the rooms had fallen at once. Had they leapt down from the walls in a concerted effort to break themselves?

  But, of course, no one has tried to exert their influence over the colour of your walls. It is you, you realise, who has painted your own yellow walls brown with the endless cigarettes, one after the other, the smoke of which gathers in the back of the mouth and makes the scars sting in a way that you mistake for pleasure. A tobacco chewer mistakes the cuts they make on the gingiva, and the sting of the salt, the relief from the lack of having chewed tobacco, for pleasure. Isn’t all pleasure like that?

  A misrepresentation to the self, by the self?

  If you wear a cardigan and a jacket, if you wear a scarf, in the autumn you can smoke in the garden and listen to the sounds of a celebration off in the distance. What are they celebrating? There is no way of knowing, but is that relevant anyway? Let us imagine that Ernest Hemingway, the famous modernist writer who will go on later to commit suicide by gunshot to the head, has returned to Paris having defeated the Nazis. Keen to share the victory with someone whom he knows will appreciate it, he has driven a convoy of Americans to Sylvia Beach’s bookshop Shakespeare and Company on the rue de l’Odéon. He has liberated her from the snipers who have been harassing and killing passers-by. Her bookshop published the book Ulysses which, despite being inferior in all respects to Finnegans
Wake, is the book for which its author, James Joyce, is best remembered.

  That might provoke a celebration the like of which you hear in the distance as you smoke cigarettes in the garden. It is not that celebration, which is taking place many miles away in Paris, but it is the same kind of thing – gunshot, laughter, cheering, furious near frantic behaviour borne of years of fear, now relieved. You can listen to that and smoke, and though you do not recognise the new attendants, and many of the others are gone or aged a decade overnight, you can smile to them.

  When people celebrate they will come up to you, even if you are withdrawn and affectless with a blanket over your knees and your cigarettes and matches held in place so they will not fall. They will grab you by the face and kiss you, on the lips and perhaps on the forehead.

  They will ruffle your hair.

  If you do not respond they will laugh and another will come and put his or her arm around you and carry on a conversation very loudly in your ear. They are right; you should be involved in communal celebrations of this type. You are not dead. But you are in a withdrawn and affectless mood, so cannot reciprocate.

  They are so cheerful that your lack of affect will not dampen their mood, and this is one of the few times you can remember where it is fine to sit and not be engaged without anyone feeling they have to up the stakes, or gee you along, or to root out the source of the trouble, or to give you increasingly high doses of serum, or barbiturates, or injections of seawater, and instead they just let you be in your state while they are in theirs.