by A. S. Byatt
‘I don’t need company, Mr Isaksen. I don’t need to be – entertained. I have – I have things to do.’
Before his intervention, something had been going on, in the silence. He had spoiled it. She stared angrily at him.
‘Forget I spoke, please. I am in need of speech, from time to time, but that is nothing to do with you, as I can understand.’
The dreadful thing was that her refusal had made more of an event, had brought them closer together.
The next day she decided, as she walked along the Boulevard Victor-Hugo, that she would certainly leave Nîmes. She kept in the shelter of the plane trees, like a southerner. She decided that, since she was leaving, she would do the city the courtesy of going to the Maison Carrée. Ezra Pound had said it was a structure of ideal beauty. She had read the guidebook. It was made of the local pierre de Lens, shining white when quarried in the garrigue, turning golden with time and sunlight. It was tall, high on a pedestal, with Corinthian columns ornamented with acanthus leaves, and a frieze of fruits and heads of bulls or lions. It had been the centre of the Roman forum, part of a Franciscan monastery, owned and embellished and pierced by Visigoths, Moors and monks. Staircases had been raised and razed round it. In 1576 the Duchess of Uzès had decided to transform it into a mausoleum for her dead husband, but the City Fathers had resisted. It had been a place of sacrifice according to Nils Isaksen, who had a Viking bloodthirstiness under his bloodless skin.
She climbed the high steps of the portico, and looked out between the columns at the human space around the ancient house. She could see the discreet, vanishing gleam of the Carré d’Art, across the place. The guidebook told her that the square house was now a museum for the city’s archaeology, the endlessly unearthed Pans and nymphs, dancers and gladiators. But the guidebook was out of date. There was nothing there but red ochre paint, and a few informative placards. What do you do in a dark red space, full of stony art? Patricia walked along, around, and across. She remembered wondering when it made sense to stop looking – at a pictured dandelion, a windbreak, a frozen avalanche. She went out of the Maison Carrée in a dreamy rush, across the portico and down the steps. Between the place and the narrow maze of little streets runs a cobbled lane, along which cars and motorcycles run, occasionally and unexpectedly. The heat and the light dazzled her. She blinked at the dark, bright blue, at the burning white. She narrowed her eyes, and plunged forward. Several things happened. A screaming – brakes and a bystander – a grip like a claw on her wrist, twisting and dragging. She was on her knees in front of the square house, looking up at the violet form of Nils Isaksen’s face above her, framed by his white-gold curls, and the spiky rim of his hat. Somewhere beyond, a dark driver, with the Nîmois nose, was making a speech of mingled reproach and regret.
‘You cannot make him an accomplice – that is to say, responsible –’ said Nils.
‘Don’t be absurd. I was dazzled.’
‘You looked neither to right nor to left. I saw. You threw yourself under his wheels.’
‘I did not. I could not see. The sun dazzled me, after the dark.’
‘I saw you. You threw yourself.’
‘And how did you come to be there?’ asked Patricia, one human being to another. She stood up, wiping dust and blood from her knees and the palms of her hands like a schoolgirl. She bowed to the driver, and made a gesture of abasement with her head and arms. ‘How?’ she said, to Nils Isaksen.
‘I was passing by. I thought I would ask you to have lunch with me. I stepped forward to do that, and you plunged. So I was able to take hold.’
‘Thank you.’
They ate lunch under an ivory-coloured parasol, next to the fountain with the unmoving energetic crocodile. Patricia had quails’ eggs in aspic, pale little spheres in translucent coffin-shapes of jelly, flecked with sprigs of herbs. Her palms and her knees were stinging as they had not stung since school playgrounds. The sunlight packed down, dense and brilliant. The canvas was not enough protection. Sweat ran along her upper lip, between her breasts, in the crook of her elbow. Nils Isaksen had an angry red line between his hair and his shirt collar. Blood pulsed beside his Adam’s apple, ruddy where it should have been pale. He asked if she liked her aspic. He had chosen barquettes of brandade de morue. A northern fish, he said, the codfish. It seemed illicit and unnatural, made into a paste, would she say? – a purée? – with olive oil. And garlic. Excuse me, he said, you have dust on your cheeks, from your fall. May I? He touched her cheekbone with his napkin. All the same, he said, you took a plunge. I will say no more. But I was watching. You launched yourself, so to speak, from the plinth of the Maison Carrée. I would like to be able to help.
‘Help,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe in help. I believe . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘I believe in indifference,’ said Patricia Nimmo. ‘The flow of things. Anything. One thing, then another thing. Crocodile fountains. Dust. Sun. Eggs in aspic. I’m talking nonsense. The sun’s moved. It’s in my eyes.’
‘We could change chairs. I have dark glasses. I have a hat. Please – ’
They stood up. They changed places. Nils Isaksen said:
‘I understand you. You will think I don’t, but I think I do. To me indifference is a temptation, fatally easy. You will say that he is insensitive, he has understood nothing, he is a fool, everybody believes indifference is bad, but I, Patricia Nimmo, have secret wisdom, I know there is good in it. That is what you think, don’t you? Whereas, Mrs Nimmo, I dare to offend you by saying I have been there, I have tried indifference, it is a good station for changing trains, then it becomes – cement. Cement. You did not launch yourself into the path of that Corvette out of indifference.’
‘Out of the purest indifference. If it was a launch, it was out of indifference.’
‘We are in deep.’
‘Talking does no good.’
‘I should like to recommend curiosity. You must take an interest. Curiosity and indifference, Mrs Nimmo, are opposites, you will say. But not truly. For both are indiscriminate. You may sit there, glass-eyed while things slip past, what did you say, eggs in aspic, crocodile fountains, the stones of this city. Or you may look with curiosity, and live. I am trying to learn this city. It is not a trivial undertaking. I am learning these stones. You are right, in part, I believe it is a matter of indifference what you learn – or rather, it is a matter of blind fate, which has a creepy way of looking like destiny. But you must be curious, you must take an interest. This is human.’
The truth was, Patricia thought, with a trace of her old wit, he looked dreadfully inhuman as he said this, staring like a gargoyle, his pale skin flaking in patches, his yellow-white curls sweat-streaked, his lips stretched with evangelical fervour. He did not create curiosity about himself, by no means.
‘I take an interest in you,’ he said, plucking off his dark glasses and turning a dazzled blue stare on her.
‘I don’t want a guardian angel, I’m afraid,’ said Patricia, pushing back her chair.
‘Afraid?’
‘I’m sorry. I don’t want, that is what I mean, I don’t want – ’ She stood up and walked away in the white-gold air.
Because she forgot to pay for her lunch and also because she possibly owed him her life, she went with him two days later to the museum. The building stood, almost Roman, around an inner courtyard, round whose walls, in a kind of cloister, were partly ordered rows and heaps of ancient burial stones, dignitaries, priestesses, warriors, some with effigies, portly matrons with heavy heads of hair, noseless busts in togas. Inside were more stones, much older, menhirs with strange whiskered faces and fine-fingered pointy hands, a sabre-toothed tiger, the skull of a Stone Age survivor of one trepanning who had died at the second attempt. Patricia walked briskly, and Nils walked slowly, calling her to look at choice objects. ‘My favourite,’ said Nils Isaksen, ‘fresh with life, look here, the Roman flower-seller from Vic-le-Fesc.’
It was a white stone, carved deep.
NON VENDO
NI
SI AMANTIBUS
CORONAS
He translated: ‘I do not sell my crowns, except to lovers.’
‘I can read Latin. Thank you.’
He took her to see the gladiators. Lucius Pompeius, net-fighter, put to combat nine times, born in Vienna, dead at 25 years, rests here. Optata, his wife, with his money, made this tomb. Colombus, myrmillon from Severus troop, 25. Sperata, his wife. Aptus, Thracian, born in Alexandria, dead at 37, buried by Optata his wife. Quintus Vettius Gracilis, a Spaniard, thrice-crowned, dead at 25. Lucius Sestius Latinus, his teacher, gave this tomb. There were only replicas in the glass case in the museum. Nils said he had hoped to be able to work on the tombs of these dead fighters. Three or four centuries, he said, of dead young men, swordsmen and net-throwers, from all over the Empire and beyond, buried now under cafés and cinemas, pâtisseries and churches. Ten or so had got turned up by accident, he said, over the centuries, out of the thousands. He hoped to find a northman, perhaps.
‘Why?’ asked Patricia, without curiosity.
‘A buried berserker, with his amulets. It has been known.’
‘He would have done better not to come here,’ said Patricia. ‘Hypothetically.’
‘Do you know,’ said Nils, ‘that there is a theory that Valhall, in the Grimnismal, was based on the Roman Colosseum? Valhall was described with 640 doors – a circular place where the spirits of warriors fought daily and the dead were daily revived to feast on hydromel and the flesh of the magic boar, until the last battle, when they would go out to fight, eight hundred at a time, through the 640 doorways. The northern paradise is perhaps linked to these stone rings here. We were fighters.’
‘Tant pis,’ said Patricia. ‘They died long ago. Leave them in peace.’
‘Peace –’ began Nils. But she had walked away from stones and bones, along a corridor, up a stair.
In a long narrow dim room, she came face to face with two stuffed bulls. They faced the doorway, balancing trim muscular bodies on delicate hoofs, pointing sharp horns, staring from liquid brown glass eyes. They had been reconstructed with anatomical intelligence, with respect. They had been killed a century apart, ‘Tabenaro’ in September 1894, ‘Navarro’ in 1994 at the centenary corrida for the Granaderia Pablo Romero from which both came. Their hides were both glossy and dusty, Tabenaro pied, Navarro a flea-bitten iron grey. Both skins were slashed, ripped and stitched together like patchwork quilts, flaps reconstructed round the wounds of pic, of banderillas, of the sword. Behind them, along a central island trudged a dusty procession of beasts, a sample of rejects from the Ark, some wearing their reconstituted fur and skin, some standing bleached and bony. A wild boar, Sus scrofa, and five striped piglets; a Siberian bear; a musk bull and calf; two differing deer; a looming derelict moose; a young dromedary, its ears frayed to bare holes, but its eyelashes long, tufted and curving; behind this dusty beast the bone-cages of a giraffe and a llama; behind these a Camarguais calf, a very small Camarguais foal, and the skeleton of a Camarguais horse; behind these the huge bony head of a whale beached in 1874 at Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.
Round the walls of the long room were other beasts in cages: monkeys and sloths, weasels and beavers, spotted cats and a polar bear, orang-utan and gorilla. In one glass case were curiosities, two-headed sheep, a monster with one gentle face and two bodies trailing eight woolly legs.
And the reptiles. An amphisbaena, leathery-brown, long harmless local snakes, asps in jars. Aspic commun. Vipère aspic, vipera aspic, Lin. And mummies of crocodiles from Egyptian tombs, boneless, long, leathery parcels, Nîmois.
‘Le crocodile, animal sacré des anciens prêtres égyptiens, était embaumé après sa mort. On le trouve en abondance dans les tombes.’
Nils Isaksen loomed behind her. He pointed out, to please her, that the text engraved above the roof-arch was English, from Francis Bacon, 1626.
Interprète et ministre de la nature L’homme ne peut la connaître Qu’autant qu’il l’observe.
‘Curiosity,’ said Nils Isaksen. ‘You see.’
A very large cayman was rampant on the wall behind him, not discreetly tubular like the Egyptian mummy, but clawed and brightly glazed.
‘We are the only people here. The dust makes me want to sneeze. The poor beasts should have been let die decently.’
‘Look at the love, in the pose of those bulls, in the stitches.’
‘Love?’
‘Of a sort.’
‘Horrible.’
‘Interesting.’
That night, as usual, they dined separately, and then drank together in the bar. Patricia was disinclined to speak. The glass angle of the bar was brightly lit in the shadowed garden. The fountain bubbled and splashed. Nils Isaksen said he had something he would like to show her. He emptied out the pockets of his blue-green linen jacket on the glass table between them. There was a scattering of stones – one or two mosaic tesserae, a fragment of the golden Lens stone, a sphere of black shiny stone, a handful of sunflower seeds, a crudely carved amulet of an iron hammer on a ring.
‘I found it in an antique shop,’ said Nils Isaksen. ‘In a tray of little things dug up by workmen, bottles and coins and beads. I know what it is. It is Thor’s hammer. It is Mjölnir. It will have come from a grave, maybe of my berserker gladiator. They were everywhere in those days, these little hammers. In marriage-beds and graves. To help the spirit on its way to Valhalla, perhaps. Or perhaps to prevent the ghost from rising to stalk the living. Maybe there are more under this pavement. Maybe.’
‘Are you sure it is so old?’
‘Decidedly. It is my profession.’
Patricia picked up the little dark ball. When she turned it in the candlelight it sparked with a blue fire that ran in veins and flakes in its glossy substance.
‘Pretty,’ she said.
‘Labradorite,’ said Nils Isaksen. ‘A kind of feldspar.’ He hesitated. ‘When I put up the tombstone of my wife, Liv, I made it of a single slab of labradorite. It is a costly stone. It flashes like the Northern Lights in the land of the Northern Lights. I wrote on the stone only her name, Liv, which is to say, Life. She was my life. And her dates, because she was born, and died. It is in a small churchyard, surrounded by bare space. It is too cold for trees or bushes, mostly. I put a hammer in the grave with her, Mjölnir, as my ancestors would have done. Thor was the god of lightning. There is lightning in the labradorite.’
Patricia put the stone down, quickly. Nils Isaksen stared through the glass at the cedars and olives and flouncing water.
‘In the town beyond my own, towards the Arctic Circle, there is a single tree. Those towns, you know, are as far from Oslo as Rome is. Further than Nîmes. Every winter, people wrap the tree, they shroud it against the cold. The sun does not rise for months, we live in the dark, with our shrouded tree. We imagine the south.’
He pushed his stones, his seeds, and his amulet around the glass table-top, like counters in a game.
Patricia slept deeply, at first. She woke suddenly, from a confused dream of long corridors, lined with high glass cases. She went to the window. The square pane framed the huge liquid ball of the moon’s light, a full moon. The sky was spangled with stars. The light poured from the moon on to garden walls, and the great stone bowl of geraniums, fiery in daylight, now silver-rose. The air-conditioning cranked and hummed. She put her forehead on the glass. A rhythm struggled to be remembered. ‘This case of that huge spirit now is cold.’ She moved her lively golden toes in the soft carpet and rubbed her face on the almost-cold glass. When she opened the window, the night air was warm on her skin, though the moonlight was cold.
She ordered breakfast in her room. She slipped out early: even so, the air was like a hot bath as soon as she was beyond the shadow of the Impérator Concorde. She went to the Carré d’Art. It is a beautiful building, discreet, ghostly, absent, a space of grey glass cubes on fine matt steely pillars, taller than the Maison Carrée but deferring to it, with a kind of magnified geomet
rical repetition and transformation of the proportions of its elegant solidity. Inside, up the wide, steep staircase, in the calm muted light was an exhibition of the work of a German, Sigmar Polke. Patricia’s attention was churning, like water boiling in a jug, a stream of rising currents, a troubled, jagged surface, a downdraught, a bubbling up. She floated from room to room, her sandalled feet soundless, her lavender muslin skirt wafting round her cool knees. Sigmar Polke is strong and witty and various. The old Patricia would have been delighted. There was a wall of images of watch-towers at the corner of barbed-wire fences. There was a room full of gay, charming images of the French Revolution. A pile of parcels, a triangle, two cubes, a diagonal, brightly spattered with tri-coloured motifs, a flower, a Gallic cock, which resolved itself into the blade, ladder and basket of the guillotine. Two eighteenth-century mannikins playing in an Arcadian field with a ball which turns out to be a severed head. In another room, a blown-up drawing of Mother Holle shaking out snow from her feather-bed in the clouds. A high room full of huge, romantic, stained sheets of colour, labelled Apparizione. Gilded puddles, seas of cobalt and lapis, floating milky and creamy clouds and vapours, forked mountains, blue promontories, crevasses and fjords of swirling indigo, pendent rocks hanging over crimson and russet lakes with dragonish jaws or long fingers of purple and bleached bone clutching froth, veiled norns and mocking ghouls, drowning white birds and crumbling citadels. The text beside these visionary expanses emphasised vanishing and danger. Polke paints with currently discarded pigments that are poisons, orpiment, Schweinfurt green, lapis. He mixes unstable chemicals: aluminium, iron, potassium, manganese, zinc, barium, turpentine, alcohol, methanol, smoke black, sealing wax and corrosive lacquers. His surfaces shift and dislimn, the stains change, become indistinct, no shapes hold, no colours are constant. The world of these apparitions is ghastly and lovely. Patricia stared. Here were beauty and danger, flat on a wall. She said in her head, ‘What shall I do? What can I do?’ She stared at the falling veils of melting snow, of curdled cream. How do you decide when to stop looking at something? It is not like a book, page after page, page after page, end. How do you decide?
