Grand Union

by Zadie Smith

  When the Usurper was first put in power, Esorik behaved like most island people. She called him the “Usurper” although he had been chosen, however misguidedly, by the people, and she encouraged everyone in her circle to spit on the floor three times whenever his name was mentioned. She presided over a circle of five—two males, two females and herself—and they were now in their fourth cycle, Esorik having had her children fifteen years earlier, whom Lohim and Seg had then cared for—while she educated herself and worked in the world outside their compound, and spread her passions thinly within it. But Lohim and Seg, men in their thirties at the time of the Usurper, found the moment for their own divergence had come, and of course now dear Leela and Ori were pregnant in their turn. At the very moment the Usurper took power, then, Esorik was deep into the satisfied, ripened period of her life: re-greeting her children, saying farewell to Lohim and Seg, seeking new lovers and fresh passion, and preparing to put her island duties aside—Labor, Praxis and Anima entire—so as to care for the soon-to-be-born. And it was because of this fullness in her own existence, perhaps, that she had experienced the Usurper, initially, as only the intrusion of the worldly on the intimate. She did not see why the story of her life or anybody’s should be so profoundly distorted by this monstrosity from the mainland. In her time she had met many people of the outer archipelagoes who, when you traded with them, did nothing but bemoan the corruption of those who ruled over them, and often seemed, to Esorik—who did not believe she lived in a comparable state of emergency—distracted by their own misery, monomaniacal in their fixation upon a justice beyond their grasp. Yes, Esorik had known many such people, and felt profoundly sorry for them, but in her innocence, she had never imagined she could so easily become one of them. For a period, she had an urge to petulantly refuse the new situation. At the same time, some part of her always understood this reaction to be both childish and typical of an older woman who had seen many cycles. She kept it to herself.

  * * *

  • • •

  Like most people on the island, she considered it her civic duty to supervise, within her circle, the construction of a bier—in their case a bier of walnut and silver, the building of which took fourteen days—and then to lay their youngest member upon it, bound and blindfold, topped and tailed by candles. With at least a million others, they rolled out their bier on the assigned night, down to the closest shore. As had been hoped, the circumference of the island was thus lit up, and it was visible from the mainland—an entire generation mute and alight—of which vision the mainland took note, as did the Usurper, and none of it made a whit of earthly difference. Yet she felt better. It made sense to the storytelling part of her, which, as we have seen, was almost all of her, even though these old forms of story, popular on the island, appeared to the mainland to be antique and idealistic and the very reason the Usurper had found such favor in the first place. The Usurper, for his part, placed his youngest girl—his circle was only young girls—on a gimcrack bier, covered in flowers, in the sunstruck middle of the day, and gave a vulgar public address as he loomed over her body, in which he ridiculed men like Lohim and Seg and the very concept of the cycle. Like many others, Esorik recognized this address as the oldest story form of them all—The Father Who Eats His Young—but knowing a thing, and accepting it calmly—as only another rhythm in the infinite cycle—are very different matters.

  * * *

  • • •

  She became enraged. Like many storytellers, she entered his mind, even though, on the island, this remained wholly prohibited: a gift long ago set aside so that other gifts might flourish. His mind was exactly as everyone had expected, it writhed and it oozed. It was an abomination. But it was satisfying to have that fact confirmed at least, and soon details were everywhere, circulating as songs and riddles, filthy jokes and rhyming curses, for though Esorik told no one of what she saw, many others, motivated by the common rage, were far less circumspect, and having so little respect for what they uncovered inside the Usurper, felt within their rights to spread the news far and wide, without caution, heedless of the island’s oldest taboo. The dock women, for example, with whom Esorik packed fish—whose labor was, by necessity, eight tenths of their cycle—sang the ugly new songs as they worked, cackling and whooping at the end of each vicious line, as familiar now with the workings of the Usurper’s mind as any seer or storyteller. Such barbarism became general. Hunting the white hart returned to fashion. Friends of Esorik, people she’d known for years, turned their circles into hunting parties and chased that elusive animal through its habitat, stabbed it in multiples of seven—seven strokes each—and then stood over the poor beast’s heaving belly as it bled out into the earth and over their shoes. Behavior like this had not been seen for thirty cycles or more, but as long as the Usurper venerated the white hart and believed it to be the source of his power, the creatures themselves were considered fair game, killed in reality to repudiate a symbol.

  * * *

  • • •

  Esorik did not sing the songs or hunt the harts, but years later, looking back on that tragic period, she reflected on the many ways, small yet significant, in which she had contributed to the breaking of all the cycles she had ever known. She remembered that when teaching The Canker in the Rose, for example, teaching it over and over—it became the only form she could bear to impart—the children would get bored of the repetitive lesson, and stray from their circle under the tree, gathering instead in smaller groups to sing the ugliest songs and imagine the ritual dismemberment of the Usurper, or the fiery destruction of the mainland and the emergence of a self-determining island, fantasies they had heard adults in their own circles repeat, and which they now retold, with great verve and excitement, as if they were mere fairy tales from the fireside . . .

  Yet when Esorik had heard the children speak in this way, she had not stopped them, in fact she’d often encouraged them, even laughed, for the Usurper was one of whom you could say anything, think anything. He was a universal license. Cycles became meaningless. Everybody circled only around him. And when he singled out the Ekalbia, for living nowhere and trading with everyone, some part of Esorik, at the time, in that atmosphere of madness, had found it a satisfying story that so many of the Ekalbia’s little curraghs should have sunk a mile from the mainland, drowning Ekalbia men, women and children, their compact sable bodies appearing for months later at the shoreline, their bright green eyes as still as sea glass. All because the Usurper had not granted them the right to dock on one of the stormiest nights of the year, which tragic tale had only proved her point, it simply demonstrated the ruthlessness and barbarism of the Usurper, and of all who followed him—and what else is a story for?

  FOR THE KING

  Arriving in Paris from Strasbourg, I rushed from Gare de l’Est to meet my friend, V, who had agreed to take me for a late dinner. It would be his plan and his treat, all I had to do was meet him on Rue Montalembert at 9:15, outside my hotel. I’d been working, and reaching my hotel with five minutes to spare, took the opportunity to rush upstairs to change, with that strange urgency sometimes brought to dressing for friends, especially if, like V, they are themselves beautiful and welldressed. I took off the high-waisted jeans and severe shirt buttoned to the neck, replacing them with a long silk dress, black, but dotted with yellow flowers, a crisp denim jacket, big white trainers, and some very red lipstick. I ran back downstairs. I had informed my friend, in an e-mail, that I was exhausted with talking, that I had talked myself to death, and he should do all the talking, on all subjects, no matter how small. I wanted to hear everything, even the dullest minutiae of his life. The moment we saw each other, however, we fell into a mutual unburdening, speaking over each other in a series of overlapping waves as we walked through the city: his work and mine, his family and my own, the situation in Europe versus the situation in America, gossip about mutual acquaintances, and any other interesting developments that had occurred since we’d last seen
each other, a year earlier, in London. I’d been surprised to discover that he was in Paris at all, and now he explained he’d won a bursary, which had installed him as an artist-in-residence at the university, so that he was presently surrounded on all sides by academics. He found them curious people: never able to say a word without qualifying it from fifteen different angles. To listen to them, he said, is to be confronted with a mass of verbal footnotes. And, by contrast, whenever I open my mouth to speak, unthinkingly, as you know I always do, saying whatever comes into my head, everybody looks utterly horrified. Or else, they tell me I’m brave. But it’s awful to be told you’re brave when you had no idea that you were taking a risk!

  The day had been unseasonably hot—twenty-eight degrees in October—and by the time we got to the restaurant it was still warm enough to eat outside. We were led to our seats by a waiter of incredible beauty who immediately became a topic of conversation. He was black, very young, slender yet muscular, and moved like a dancer between the tables, openly flirting with many of the male diners, including my friend. And how is your boyfriend? I asked V, pointedly. Your boyfriend of twenty years’ standing who lives by the sea? How is he? Oh, he is well, replied my friend, with a look of mock-formality upon his face. He continues to be very well. Although we are in an interesting new phase of our relationship where I begin to notice that it’s better if I tell him only about the amusing encounters—where the sex went wrong or something ludicrous happened—whereas if I have an actual connection with someone, it’s better if I keep that to myself, because if I tell him, he goes quiet, he feels hurt in some way. Though of course for me it is exactly the real connections that are most worth talking about and therefore those are the ones that I feel most guilty about keeping from him, because by omitting them I omit a part of my real, lived experience. It’s a conundrum!

  Listening to V made me smile. When he asked me why, I said I was thinking about all the middle-aged people in the world, presently torturing themselves as they observed—mainly via lifestyle articles in their Sunday papers—the polyamory of the young, which led them to wonder whether, after twenty years of marriage, it was not too late to introduce the idea of opening up their own relationships in some way. V laughed. In my culture, he said (making the word “culture” sound satirical), that conversation is radically sped up. Two men get together and are absolutely blissful. The happiness goes on and on. But then they check the calendar and lo and behold three months have gone by and it’s time to consider an open relationship . . . The beautiful waiter returned to ask what we wanted to drink, and a moment later, in the most charming way possible, expressed the usual French disbelief in the existence of a vodka martini. V picked a bottle of white wine instead and sat back in his chair as the waiter left, admiring him as he returned to the kitchen. I told V that I used to think people were wildly jealous of what they perceived as the sexual freedom of men like him, but now I felt that most people did not really want sexual freedom after all, not, at least, if it meant having to grant the same freedom to those whom they wanted for themselves. No, what we wanted at least as much as sex was the opportunity to re-create, replay and improve upon our old family dramas, in a new house, with new mothers and fathers, except this time around your parent would be someone you could also have sex with, as Freud pointed out. One of Freud’s greatest insights in fact was that there was nothing more perverse than bourgeois married life. V nodded vigorously as he tore at a piece of bread. Amen to that! These days, I continued, when I look at the figure of the aging lothario, for example, jumping from girl to girl, what I really see is a man desperately looking to be mothered. I wonder what happens to that instinct in men like you? V sighed. It’s possible, he said, that the very definition of the gay man is he who has had enough mothering to last a lifetime.

  Over our main course, we discussed Parisian sex clubs and orgies. A good friend of V’s attended them with some regularity and had given him a full report, which he now passed on to me. I was very interested in the little lockers where you put your clothes and also the fact that so many people kept their socks on. What interested me most, however, was the idea of treating other people like objects, but before I could get very far down this line of inquiry, my friend interrupted me. I didn’t say objects, he said, I was talking of body parts, of orifices and members, which is very different. Those organs all have the same capacity for pleasure, and are equally ignorant of who “owns” them. It’s you who moralize, bringing up the difference between objects and persons. And anyway, what matters at an orgy is not a different attitude to people but a different relationship to time. You—V pointed a finger at my chest—are altogether too conscious of time. It distorts your view of many things. Even your own family drama—I mean of course the age gap between your parents—has always been understood by you as a fundamental inequality between them. But I am in a relationship with a similar gap and rarely think about it. You choose to think it so important because time is your preoccupation. For example, I can remember once telling you about a busy day of sexual encounters I’d had around the city and you said you couldn’t really understand daytime sex on the grounds that it “wasted time.” Time that could be more profitably spent working! V threw his hands up in despair. It was my turn to laugh and also to protest—in the spirit of these things I had been at least half joking. Yes, persisted V, but at the core of it there was a truth. I think of sex, any act of sex, as something that ignores and in fact obliterates time, so that sexual pleasure never is and never could be a waste of time, because it negates time entirely!

  After we had cleaned our plates—in my case to the point you would never know it had ever had food on it—the waiter returned and ignored our mutually feigned ambivalence toward dessert. We ordered a platter of mixed cheeses and a giant crème brûlée. I tried to defend myself by pointing out that a woman’s life so often feels dictated by time: biological time, historical time, personal time. I thought of my friend Sarah who once wrote that a mother is a sort of timepiece for a child, because the time of a child’s life is measured against the time of the mother. A mother is the backdrop against which a child’s life is played out. It might be understandable if such a time-weighted being found it hard to allow pleasure to entirely obliterate time. V pretended to seriously consider this counter-argument but then as soon as I’d stopped speaking presented a substantial list of women artists, past and present, who’d delighted in daytime sex, although how he knew this about them he didn’t explain. Maybe you’re simply too English, suggested V, and I conceded the point.

  By the time V paid the bill it was past midnight, but as we’d started late we felt we hadn’t quite had enough of each other, so proceeded to Café de Flore, ordered more wine, and considered all the exercise we would have to do the next morning to counter the effects of the wine, cheese and sugar on our middle-aged physiques. I asked him how he felt about aging. V frowned and asked why was I worrying about the subject, I looked exactly the same. But that’s what friends always say, I replied, and they’re not lying, but it’s a delusion of familiarity. I don’t feel that you’ve aged or that any of my friends have aged but that can’t possibly be the case. Yes, said V, but you really haven’t or not that much, so it’s offensive and boring—not to mention in bad taste—to hear you complain about something that barely affects you. I reached out to pinch V’s waistband, and pointed out the—what? Twenty-nine inches it had always been? Twenty-eight, he cried. It’s twenty-eight! Please get it right and also make a note so you remember! I promised to do so. With his iPhone, V took a selfie of the two of us, which we eagerly bent over the screen to study, only to discover that neither of us looked anywhere near as young as we’d imagined. But if we were white, said V, a little glumly, putting his phone back in his pocket, it would already be a lost cause so at least we have that to be thankful for. Still, one day I know that I will look in the mirror and see one of those very, very old men you see selling fish by the river in rural Chinese villages, and you wi
ll look and find whatever the Jamaican equivalent of that is. It will happen very abruptly. We’ll have been thirty-seven for twenty years and then all of a sudden we’ll both be a hundred and five.

  By this point we were quite drunk. Our conversation staggered around haphazardly, like an old fool stumbling down the road, paying no attention to the cracks in the pavement. We wondered what young people overhearing us might make of our ancient conceptual divisions—straight, gay, bi, men, women—how ridiculous we must sound to them. I put it to V that in revolutions young people are generally always right and old people almost always wrong, but V rolled his eyes and said: Well, if that were true we’d all still be living in spiritual cults in the San Fernando Valley. I was wrong at twenty, he murmured, and I’m still wrong now. Being wrong is a lifelong occupation. We fell quiet and watched the street traffic. Since my last visit to Paris a new kind of electric scooter had invaded the city, like the child’s version but twice the size and made of metal. People left them abandoned wherever and whenever they felt like, then took them up again, using an app on their phones, translating this new technology into ancient Parisian habits, so that as we sat in Café de Flore we could watch several pairs of picturesque lovers go by, two bodies on a single scooter, helmetless, holding each other, as they had previously done on Vespas and on bikes, in 2CVs and horse-drawn carriages, or on the back of a farmer’s trailer, snug upon bales of hay.