The Four-Gated City

by Doris Lessing

All this in a fast low voice, a murmur, while she swayed back and forth from side to side. It was the monotone self-absorbed murmur of madness, for she did not really care if Martha answered her or not. Or perhaps the even monotonous tone was a way of keeping herself on an even keel, as Martha did not speak, or maintained her voice on a level, so as not to jar away the pictures. Or perhaps the murmur was a way of saying to Martha: Don’t interrupt, this way of talking is a way of thinking, I find out what I think when I talk.

  But if Lynda had spoken thus before a nurse in a mental hospital, before a psychiatrist, they would have said: ‘Mrs. Coldridge is badly confused today.’

  Martha said: ‘But if the human brain could be a space probe or a moon-walker or a radar, it could also be a bomb or a disintegrator, and people would use it to destroy, they aren’t fitted.’

  Martha lay face down, eyes closed, watching gardens, fantastic gardens, beautiful gardens … never had she imagined such gardens, she wanted to cry because of their beauty: Nurse, nurse, I’m seeing such lovely gardens!

  ‘Are you, dear? You’re a bit hallucinated-just take this pill and go to sleep.’

  Lynda said: ‘Like a man who has lost a hand, he uses a machine-hand instead. But you must be careful, Martha, careful, you mustn’t say what you know, they’ll lock you up, they want machines, they don’t want people … but you can do it. Once I thought I could do it, but I can’t. I am ruined you see. My mind was ruined by all the drugs, my mind is no good now, and then there was that electric shock machine they put on my head when I was a girl, ever since then I’m not what I was. I pretend to myself I am sometimes but I’m not, but you could do it, you can find out, I am sure there are people somewhere who know.’

  The word drug had snagged on Martha’s attention. She thought: if drugs could cause the clarity, heighten it, make the pictures deeper, open the door to … her feet had taken her off the floor and into the bathroom. Lynda’s drugs were in bottles ranged from end to end along a four-foot shelf. If she took … she was gripped by her arms from behind, and pills, already in her hand, fell into the bath. But she had half-expected Lynda to follow her; had even invited it, relied on it: as a child provokes a parent into showing attention. Lynda pushed Martha away, and got on to her knees to pick up the sweet-like pills that had fallen to the floor. These she flung into the bath too, turned the taps on, and washed them all away. Then, without looking at Martha she went back to her place on the floor, Martha returned to lie beside her.

  Lynda said: ‘You only did that because you were afraid when I said you had to do it, had to get out. You know it will be very hard, and so you thought, if I take drugs I’ll have an excuse not to try, because I’ll be ruined-that’s what you were thinking.’

  Martha was tired. Yet she was restless. She wanted to go out and walk, as she had not walked, since those months when she first came to this city. She must walk: but, when she pulled aside the curtain and looked out it was the dead time of the night, about two in the morning.

  ‘I’m going to walk when it’s light, ’ she announced, and plunged down to the floor again, dropping off to sleep, saying to herself. Wake me at nine.

  Her sleep was drenched with golden light, like the clear light immediately after a storm, when the sun comes out, and sky, leaves, earth, clouds shine and glitter, and the few last drops from the flying depleted cloud explode in tiny splashes of gold. Her dreams had been all of happiness: that far high hunger, yearning, which is so intense that it is soaked with the quality of beauty that it longs for, so that longing and what is longed for merges into a sharp sweet pain. To wake from such a sleep, which is all a light, a delight, and a promise, to such a day … Martha woke with a sob: she was weeping because she had to wake, and saw Lynda seated with her face to the wall, swaying back and forth, back and forth, so that her forehead bumped regularly against the wall, like a child dispelling tension. Martha remembered that in her dream, beside her in a sweet golden light, had walked Lynda, a smiling girl, and they went towards a man whose face was all strong confidence and welcome. This was Mark. Martha, awake, saw a dirty, sour-smelling bedraggled hag who sat and banged her forehead against a wall that was rusty with tiny bloodstains. The light was showing in strong outline around the curtains. It was nine o’clock.

  She got up off the floor to go out, and Lynda said: ‘It’s awful looking at outside. Don’t. You’ll be sorry.’

  It was a fine day outside, but she could not go out in the dress that she wore, which was crumpled and foul. She bathed quickly, and could not find a dress. She did not want to go upstairs now, for she was afraid of disturbing Mark, who would say: Are you all right? Shall I come with you? She put Lynda’s coat over a petticoat, and let herself out quietly.

  The day was fresh and the world newly painted. She stood on a pavement looking at a sky where soft white clouds were lit with sunlight. She wanted to cry because it was so beautiful. How long since she had looked, but really looked at the sky, so beautiful even if it was held up by tall buildings? She stood gazing up, up, until her eyes seemed absorbed in the crystalline substance of the sky with its blocks of clouds like snow banks, she seemed to be streaming out through her eyes into the skies, but then sounds came into her, they were vibrations of feet on pavement, and she looked down again at an extraordinarily hideous creature who stood watching her, out of eyes that were like coloured lumps of gelatine that had fringes of hair about them and bands of hair above them, and which half protruded from a bumpy shape of pinkish putty, or doughlike substance. The slit under the bump that had two air holes in it was stretched in a grimace that said: What are you doing? What is up there? Am I going to miss something if I don’t stare too? When the creature saw she was looking at it, the grimace twisted, and dirty teeth showed in the slit, and this was as if an animal pleaded with puckered muzzle and half-bared teeth and a raised paw because it might be beaten, but the pleading held a menace too, if the animal thought of biting before it was attacked. The creature was exposed only in the region of the face, for all the rest was covered in a varying kind of substance, from the top of the head, which had a sort of brownish shell on it, to the feet, which were inside hard cases, of a shiny material. The body was encased in a thick hairy stuff which had openings through which the head and feet emerged, and various vents, slits, pouches contrived in it for the natural functions or to carry artefacts and tools.

  It was only by the bumpy plane of pinkish tissue, surrounded and tufted with hair, in which the eyes were situated, that this creature wished to be judged, or through which it was exposed.

  It smelled awful, in a strong reek which it seemed to carry with it as it moved. The creature said something, but did not particularly expect to be answered, for when Martha walked on, the slit loosened from its stretched position and fell into a loose pout, and it moved away by putting forward one after another the two appendages below its body in a shambling balance. As it went, a four-footed creature covered with a fell of long black hair moved out from behind a parapet of brick, and lowering its hind part, it defecated among the feet of more of the two-appendaged creatures who approached. For all along the paths where they went, there were heaps of excrement, and the posts that held lamps and the corners of buildings were all soaked with strong-smelling urine.

  Martha looked up back at the sky, shutting out the street, and walked fast. The sky, oh the sky! and the trees in the square, whose branches moving in gentle air sent her messages of such joy, such peace, till she cried, Oh trees, I love you, and sky I love you! and the cloud up there, so absurd, so sweet, so softly, whitely, deliciously lolloping up there in blue air, she wished to take it in her arms and kiss it. Oh Lord! she prayed, Let me keep this, let me not lose it, oh, how could I have borne it all these years, all this life, being dead and asleep and not seeing, seeing nothing; for now everything was so much there, present, existing in an effulgence of delight, offering themselves to her, till she felt they were extensions of her and she of them, or at least, their joy and hers sang together
, so that she felt they might almost cry out Martha! Martha! for happiness, because she was seeing them, feeling them again after so long an absence from them.

  She walked, she walked, looking, gazing, her eyes becoming cloud, trees, sky and the warm salutation of sunlight on the flank of a high glowing wall. Until, suddenly, the small voice of the tutor said in her inner ear: ‘And only man is vile? And she let her eyes fall again-and wished to run back under cover, to get into shelter, fast, anywhere where she did not have to look at these beings all around her. What an extraordinary race, or near-race of half, uncompleted creatures. There they were, all soft like pale slugs, or dark slugs, with their limp flabby flesh, with hair sprouting from it, and the things like hooves on their feet, and wads or fells of hair on the tops of their heads. There they were all around her, with their roundish bony heads, that had flaps of flesh sticking out on either side, then the protuberance in the middle, with the air vents in it, and the eyes, tinted-jelly eyes which had a swivelling movement that gave them a life of their own, so that they were like creatures on their own account, minuscule twin animals living in the flesh of the face, but these organs, the eyes, had a look which contradicted their function, which was to see, to observe, for as she passed pair after pair of eyes, they all looked half-drugged, or half-asleep, dull, as if the creatures had been hypnotized or poisoned. For these people walked in their fouled and disgusting streets full of ordure and bits of refuse and paper as if they were not conscious of their existence here, were somewhere else: and they were somewhere else for only one in a hundred of these semi-animals could have said, ‘I am here, now, and conscious that I am here, now, noticing what is around me’; for each was occupied in imagining how it, he, she, was triumphing in an altercation with the landlord or the grocer or a colleague, or how it was making love, or how its child had done this, or how it would soon eat something. It was painful in a way she had never known pain, an affliction of shameful grief, to walk here today, among her own kind, looking at them as they were, seeing them, us, the human race, as visitors from a spaceship might see them, if he dropped into London or any city to report. ‘This particular planet is inhabited thickly by defectively evolved animals who …”

  For their eyes were half-useless: many wore bits of corrective glass over these spoiled or ill-grown organs; their ears were defective: many wore machines to help them hear even as much as the sounds made by their fellows: and their mouths were full of metal and foreign substances to assist teeth that were rotting, if not equipped entirely with artificial teeth since their own had been removed; and their guts were full of drugs because they could not defecate normally; and their nervous systems were numbed by the drugs they took to alleviate the damage done by the din they had chosen to live in, the fear and anxiety and tension of their lives. And they stank. They smelled abominable, awful, even under the sweet or pungent chemicals they used to hide their smell. They lived in an air which was like a thick soup of petrol and fumes and stink of sweat and bad air from lungs full of the smoke they used as a narcotic, and filthy air from their bowels.

  But the most frightening thing about them was this: that they walked and moved and went about their lives in a condition of sleep-walking: they were not aware of themselves, of other people, of what went on around them. Not even the young ones, though they seemed better than the old: a group of these might stand together looking at others passing: they stood with the masses of the pelt hanging around their faces, and the slits in their faces stretched in the sounds they made to communicate, or as they emitted a series of loud noisy breaths which was a way of indicating surprise or a need to release tension. But even these did not listen to what the others said, or only in relation to the sounds they made themselves: each seemed locked in an invisible cage which prevented them from experiencing their fellows’ thoughts, or lives, or needs. They were essentially isolated, shut in, enclosed inside their hideously defective bodies, behind their dreaming drugged eyes, above all, inside a net of wants and needs that made it impossible for them to think of anything else.

  She walked, walked, fast, wanting to get away, till she came towards a sheet or expanse of gleaming substance and saw approaching her a creature wrapped in the fur of an animal, short, pale fur on its head, its eyes wide and horrified as if in flight from something, or looking for somewhere to hide itself. This she realized after a moment, was herself. Martha, who so lately had been dissolving in joy at the sight of a sunlit cloud above an airy mass of leaf.

  She fled down Oxford Street, looking at the narrow strip of blue air above it, in which hung an explosion of golden light, and imagined how the space traveller, speeding away from the revolving bubble of golden gases might say, formulating the words of a report in his mind: ‘The third globe of solid substance out from the central swirl of brilliant light, which holds circling round it in a kind of flat spiral formation an assortment of such lumps or balls of varying kinds of solid or gaseous matter, is the globe, or ball, on which the creatures described above under Section II B, iii live. At no point did they appear to notice any member of our team: their faculties of attention and comparison are either atrophied or as yet undeveloped to an extent which enabled us to work and live among them for as long as we needed, without doing more than using their clothes and their system of communication (partly sound-oral), and concealing from them the fact that our sight, hearing, etc., are a thousand times more developed than theirs. They are so susceptible to flattery that anything may be done with them; provided they are not allowed to suspect their inferiority. For they are so vain, that they would certainly kill or imprison or maim any being they suspect of being better endowed than themselves.

  There was a harsh jiggling going on in her head. She was picking it up from somewhere? No, it was music coming from a shop. She went into the great shop, feeling herself drown in the filthy air, and pushed through a seething mass of creatures who were engaged in the process of acquiring objects in a noise and vibration of movement at which Martha’s stomach wanted to churn. She climbed into a place on a stairway from where she could look down. Beneath, a crammed space of every kind of thing, object, artefact, and people, people, people. These, the inhabitants of one of the rich countries of the world, the favoured of humanity who never stopped reading, talking, thinking, working at, health, beauty, elegance, were engaged in buying what was needed to acquire or maintain these qualities-and look at them! If you gazed down into that sea, to find a face that was not drugged with anxiety or day-dreaming; not absorbed in fantasy, not distorted by anger, or worry, or greed, then you must look, and look … Where was one person who was healthy, did not wear glasses, hearing-aids, false teeth, who slept well, who did not take half a dozen kinds of drugs, who did not attend doctors, psychiatrists? This was one of the favoured countries of the world, a country which others envied, and these were the favoured of this country. Suppose one closed the door of this emporium for a day and put in a team of researchers to find among these several thousand people ten who were, simply, whole, whose organs were normal; and who slept well and who did not take drugs. Ten? Supposing these researchers looked for ten who were in control of the amount they ate, and the smoke they drew into their lungs, and the alcohol they numbed themselves with, and how they used themselves sexually. Would they find ten?

  Now Martha remembered that Lynda had said she would feel like this, had warned her: she wanted to get back to Lynda. She struggled down through a mass of people on to the pavement, and pushed through them along the pavement. She had no money with her, she would have to walk. She fled through this species, her own, wishing only to hide herself. To conceal herself, her own ugliness, to hide what she thought.

  She rushed past trees, and the sunlight of the square: Yes, the price you paid for being awake, for being received into that grace, was this, that when you walked among your kind you had to see them, and yourself as they, we are. She did not want it again, not so soon-she was running back to the basement, fast, fast.

  In the roo
ms under the heavy house, in the basement, the lights burned behind drawn curtains, and Lynda sat exactly where Martha had left her, banging her head against the wall.

  Martha threw off the animal pelt she had used as a disguise, and lay on her back on the floor. The ceiling light, hanging low, threw an orange glow, flecked with yellow, up into a wide disc on the ceiling. The glow of orange, the dots of yellow, seemed held, or enclosed, in a wash of white light, more imagined than seen; yet there and growing into visibility as she stared. And now, imminent behind the white, was a blueish shade, as if the ground of orange, yellow, white were blue, a luminous soft blue, a bell of soft glowing blueish light, always there, but not looked at, or taken in, unless one lay on a floor, honed down by fasting and lack of sleep and walking in a world full of the drugged cripples who were one’s fellow human beings-oh, she could not bear to go out again, she would not, even if walking among the defective half-animals meant also to walk through the trees, clouds, flowers, and light which were like presences from another world whose existence just behind this one made her want to cry out with longing, with hunger. She would stay here in the basement with Lynda. She would never move out. She and Lynda would live down here and Mark would hand them food and supplies through the door, which was like a trapdoor into a submarine or a lower part of a ship. And here they would live. Why should they need to go out, they had radio sets, their own built-in television, radar, time machines … she giggled. She heard the sound disconnected from herself, like a bubble coming up through water. It was a variety of laughter. Laughter was the noises made by the species in the street when they needed to fit together two forms of fact or information that were different from each other, of different substances from each other; for their brains were so compartmented that their organisms were always being thrown off balance by having to take in, or at least to handle, two or three different kinds of fact at once, for which they were inadequately adapted. That was laughter: a kind of balancing mechanism, a shock absorber. But giggling was a retreat away from a fact which needed to be faced.