Athena

by John Banville

  But no, fake is not the right word. Unformed: that’s it. She was not being but becoming. So I thought of her. Everything she did seemed a seeking after definition. I have said she was the one who devised our games and enforced the rules, but really this seeming strength was no more than a child’s wilfulness. In the street she would dig her elbow into my ribs and stare slit-eyed at some woman passing by. ‘Hair,’ she would say out of the corner of her mouth. ‘Exact same shade as mine, did you not notice?’ Then she would shake my arm and scowl. ‘Oh, you’re hopeless!’ Poking among the drifts of immemorial rubbish in the corridors, one of our favourite pastimes, we came upon a mildewed volume of eighteenth-century erotic illustrations (suddenly it occurs to me: had she planted it there?) which she would pore over for hours. ‘Look,’ she would say, in a hushed, wondering tone, pointing to this or that indecorously sprawled figure, ‘doesn’t she look like me?’ And she would turn from the page and search my face with touching anxiousness, my poor Justine, yearning for some sort of final confirmation of … of what? Authenticity, perhaps. And yet it was precisely the inauthentic, the fragile theatre of illusions we had erected to house our increasingly exotic performances, that afforded us the fiercest and most precious transports of doomy pleasure. How keen the dark and tender thrill that shot through me when in the throes of passion she cried out my assumed – my false – name and for a second a phantom other, my jettisoned self, joined us and made a ghostly troilism of our panting labours.

  Will you laugh if I say I still think of us as innocents? No matter how dirty and even dangerous the games we played, something childlike always survived in them. No, that’s wrong, for childhood is not innocent, only ignorant; we knew what we were doing. Paradoxical as it may sound, I think it was that knowledge itself that lent to our doings a lightsome, prelapsarian air. Like all lovers, we, I (for how do I know what you felt?) lived in the conviction that there were certain things that in us came into being for the first time in the world. Not great things, of course – I was no Rilke, and you were no Gaspara Stampa – yet between us always there was that which seemed to overleap the selfish flesh, that seemed to overleap even each other and, quivering, endured, as the arrow endures the bowstring before being transformed into pure flight. And still endures.

  She told me her dreams. She dreamed of adventures, impossible journeys. Of a great dane that turned into a unicorn and ran away. Of being someone else. How solemn she would be, lying on her front with her chin on her hands and the cigarette lolling at the corner of her mouth and the swift smoke running up in a shaky line like the rope in a rope trick. The lilac shadows under her eyes. Her bitten fingernails. That flossed dip at the base of her spine. In these sleepless nights I go over her inch by inch, mapping her contours, surveyor of all I no longer possess. I see her turning slowly in the depths of memory’s screen, fixed and staring, too real to be real, like one of those three-dimensional models that computers make. It is then, when she is at her vividest, that I know I have lost her forever.

  I could feel it coming, that loss; from the start I could feel it coming. Intimations abounded: a word, a sly glance, a smile too quickly suppressed. In my arms one day she suddenly went still and put a hand to my mouth and said ‘Ssh!’ and I heard with a qualm of terror the faint, remorseless sound of a telephone ringing somewhere down in the depths of the house. A telephone! If a burst of gunfire had started up it would not have seemed more outlandish. Yet she was not surprised. Without a word she slipped from my arms and wrapped herself in my bathrobe and was gone. I followed after her, nimble with apprehension. The phone was in the basement, an ancient, bakelite model lost among jumbles of stuff on the workbench. I stopped in the doorway. She stood half turned away from me with one foot pressed on the instep of the other and the receiver cradled against her shoulder. She spoke to it softly as if to a child. I could sense that she was smiling. After a moment she hung up and turned and walked towards me with her arms tightly folded and her head lowered. Suddenly, acutely, I became aware of my nakedness. She folded herself against me and laughed with a low, tigerish rattle at the back of her throat. ‘Oh,’ she said almost gaily, ‘how cold it is!’ I stood mute with unfathomable anguish, and for a second the mist lifted and I was afforded a heartstopping view of a far and altogether different country.

  It was she who discovered No. 23. She had been watching the place for ages, she said. It was supposed to be a solicitor’s office (someone had a sense of humour) but the people she saw going in and out did not look as if they were on legal business. Then one day she arrived in the room and knelt excitedly on the couch without taking off her coat and tugged me by the hands and said I must come with her, that she had somewhere she wanted to take me. We hurried through the streets. It was mid-afternoon, there were few people about. Under an iron sky the pavements had a scrubbed, raw look and whoops of icy wind waited around corners. No. 23 presented a grimy, disused aspect. It had a big shop-window with a brown curtain pulled across it and a high, narrow front door. A. rang the bell and grinned and pressed herself against me with the crown of her head under my jaw; her hair was cold but her scalp burned. I heard dragging steps approaching inside and Ma Murphy in her cardigan and slippers opened the door and drew back her head and looked at us sceptically. ‘He’s not in,’ she said. She had a strong moustache and a bosom that reached to where her waist had once been. A. sweetly explained that it was not the solicitor we had come to see. Ma Murphy continued to regard us with suspicion. ‘Two of yiz,’ she said. If it was a question we had no answer. After another interval of dour consideration she stepped aside and motioned us in. I hesitated, as if it were the portals to the Chapel Perilous that I was breaching, but A. excitedly tugged my arm and I followed her, my Morgana.

  Ma Murphy’s broad backside swayed ahead of us up a narrow stairs. The place was dim and there was a smell of stew. A. squeezed my hand gleefully and mouthed something at me that I could not make out. On the first floor we were shown into a sort of parlour, low-ceilinged, ill-lit and chilly, with an overstuffed sofa and net curtains and a table covered with oilcloth. Brownish shadows hung down the walls like strips of old wallpaper. Ma Murphy folded her hands under her bosom and resumed her sceptical regard. A. linked her arm more tightly in mine. I began to fidget.

  ‘Yiz are not the Guards, are yiz?’ Ma Murphy said with truculence.

  A. shook her head vehemently. ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘no, we’re not the Guards.’ The woman fixed her eye on me. A. hurried on. ‘We want a girl, you see,’ she said.

  I could feel myself blush. Ma Murphy remained impassive. Unable to sustain her colourless stare I turned with hands clasped behind me and paced to the low window and looked out; this was women’s work, after all. Oh, I am a hound, and spineless, too. What was I feeling? Excitement, of course, the hot, horrible thrill of transgression; I might have been a sweaty little boy about to spy on his sister undressing. (Why do such moments always make me think of childhood? I suppose I am being reminded of first sins, those first, tentative steps into real life.) Outside, the grey was thickening; twilight already. A waft of melancholy rose in me softly, like a sigh. Below the window there was a narrow lane with dustbins and a jumble of lock-up sheds. A cat picked its way daintily along the top of a wall studded with broken glass. Why is it the detritus of the world seems to me always to signify some ungraspable thing? How could this scene mean anything, since it was only a scene because I was there to make it so? Behind me A. and the procuress were quietly discussing terms. I could have stayed there forever, glooming out of that mean little window as the winter day drew wearily to a close; not life, you see, but its frail semblance; that makes me happy.

  Our girl’s name was Rosie. She was a hard-edged twenty-year-old, slight but compactly made, with dyed yellow bangs and bad skin. She might have been the ghost of my daughter, if I had ever had a daughter. I addressed a pleasantry to her and in return was stared at coldly. She gave A. a cordial grin, however, and they struck up an immediate amity, and sat
down side by side on the bed to take off their stockings, fags clamped identically in scarlet mouths and eyes identically averted from the smoke. The room was low and bare of everything except the bed and an office chair with a plastic seat. The bed had a disturbingly clinical look to it. Uneasily I took off my clothes and loitered by the chair in my drawers, feeling the small hairs rise on my skin, more from apprehensiveness than the cold. A.’s directions were simple: she and I were to make love while Rosie watched. That, Rosie said with a shrug, was all right by her; naked, she sauntered to the chair and, giving me an ironic glance, sat down and folded her arms and crossed her legs. Her shoulders were shapely, and her left earlobe was pierced by a tiny safety pin. A. lolled on the bed in her Duchess of Alba pose. The two of them considered me, quizzical and calm. I felt … perused. The consequences were inevitable. I muttered an apology, sprawled helplessly with my mouth crushed against A.’s neck. ‘Don’t worry,’ she whispered breathily in my ear; ‘just pretend.’ She was pleased, I think. It was the way she would have wished it to be: not the act itself, but acting. And so for a quarter of an hour we toiled, miming passion, grinding and gasping and clawing the air. A. went at the task with especial energy, biting my shoulder and crying out foul words, things that she never did when we were alone and not pretending, or not pretending as much as we were now; I could hardly recognise her, and despite myself felt sad and faintly repelled. I avoided looking at Rosie – I could not have borne her disenchanted eye – but I was acutely conscious of her presence, and could hear the sound of her breathing and the tiny squeaks when she shifted her bare bum on the plastic seat. Halfway through our act she quietly lit up another cigarette. Afterwards, when she was putting on her clothes, I got up from the bed and tried to embrace her, in acknowledgement of something, I’m not sure what, and also, I suppose, as a rebuke to A. The girl went still and stood with her pants in her hands and one leg lifted, and sadly I released her. A. watched from the bed, and when Rosie was gone she stood up and laid her hand on my shoulder with a tenderness I had not known in her before that moment. ‘We’re just the same, aren’t we, the two of us,’ she said. ‘Hardly here at all.’ Or at least, might have said.

  And that night I had the strangest dream, I remember it. You were in it. We were walking together through narrow, winding passageways open to the sky. It was our quarter, or an oneiric version of it – changed and yet the same – but also it was an open-air academy of some sort, a place of scholarship and arcane ritual: there was a hint of the Orient or of Arabia. No one was about save us. It was evening, overcast and darkly luminous, the sky low and smooth and flocculent above our heads. I was baffled but you knew our purpose there, I could feel you shivering with eagerness, your arm linked tightly in mine. We did not speak but you kept smiling into my face in that way you had, lips compressed and eyes shining with a kind of spiteful glee. We came to a pair of ornate doors, temple doors, they seemed, made of many intricately arranged interlocking blocks of polished wood through the interstices of which somehow a pallid daylight gleamed out from within. With a hieratic gesture and yet irreverently smiling and winking at me over your shoulder you reached up to the two wooden handles that were set very high, above our heads, and drew the doors open. Beyond was a narrow chamber, no more than another passageway, really, with a window at the end of it in which nothing was to be seen except a grey and glowing blankness that was a part of the sky or perhaps a clouded sea. Jumbled in this room and so numerous we hardly had space to make our way between them were what at first I took to be quarter-life-sized human figurines in contorted and fantastical shapes and poses, formed it seemed from a porous grey clay and stained with mildew or a very fine-textured lichen. As I walked here and there carefully amongst them, however, I discovered that they were alive, or animate, at least, in some not quite human way. They began to make small, sinuous stirrings, like things deep in the sea stirred by a once-in-a-century underwater current. One of them, a boy-shaped homunculus with a narrow, handsome head, perched on a high pedestal, smiled at me – I could see cracks forming in the mildew or lichen around his lips – smiled as if he knew me, or in some way recognised me, and, trying to speak but making only a mute mumbling, pointed eagerly past my shoulder. It was you he was showing me, standing with your strange smile in the midst of this magicked place. You. You.

  6. Revenge of Diana 1642

  J. van Hollbein (1595-1678)

  Oil on canvas, 40 × 17½ in. (101.5 × 44.5 cm.)

  The title, which is van Hollbein’s own, will puzzle those unfamiliar with the story of Actaeon’s ill-fortune in pausing to spy upon the goddess Diana at her bath, for which piece of mortal effrontery he was changed into a stag and torn to pieces by his own hounds. Van Hollbein himself was no scholar, despite the many classical references which appear in his work; like his great contemporary, Claude Lorrain, he came from a humble background, being the son of a corn-chandler from the town of Culemborg near Utrecht, and was largely ignorant of Latin and therefore had no direct access to the Virgilian world the poise and serene radiance of which he chose to ape in the work of his mature years. In this painting, the scene with which we are presented depicts the moment when Actaeon surprises the naked goddess (and, so it would seem from his expression, himself also), and therefore the action proper is yet to come; however, despite the limitations of his technique, the painter manages by a number of deft touches subtly to suggest the drama that will follow. Actaeon’s stance, bent from the waist with arms lifted, has the tension and awkwardness of an animal rearing on its hind legs, while in the furrowing of his brow, where the drops of transfiguring water flung by the goddess still glisten, we seem to detect the incipient form of the antlers that presently will sprout there; and, of course, the dappled tunic that is draped about his thighs and chest and thrown over his left shoulder is obviously made of deerskin. Meanwhile the hounds milling at his heels are gazing up at their master in puzzlement and fierce interest, as if they have caught from him an unfamiliar, gamey scent. In the figure of Diana, too, turned half away and glaring askance at the gaping youth, we divine something of the violence that will ensue. How well the artist has caught the divine woman in her moment of confusion, at once strong and vulnerable, athletic and shapely, poised and uncertain. She looks a little like you: those odd-shaped breasts, that slender neck, the downturned mouth. But then, they all look like you; I paint you over them, like a boy scrawling his fantasies on the smirking model in an advertising hoarding. She is attended by a single nymph, who stands knee-deep in the shallows of the pool with the goddess’s chiton and girdle folded over her arm and holding in her other hand, with curious negligence, Diana’s unstrung bow. She maintains an odd, statuesque stillness, this figure, wide-eyed and impassive, her gaze fixed halfway between the goddess and the youth, as if she had been struck into immobility in the act of turning to look for the cause of Diana’s startlement and dismay. Lowering over the entire scene and dwarfing the sylvan glade and the figures caught in their fateful moment are the wooded valley walls of Gargaphia, hazed and etherial in the golden light of afternoon and yet fraught with menace and foreboding. The temple built into the rocks on the right is unreal in its pale perfection and seems to gaze with stony sadness upon the scene that is being enacted under its walls. It is this stillness and silence, this standing aghast, as we might term it, before the horror that is to come, that informs the painting and makes it peculiarly and perhaps unpleasantly compelling. Just so the world must have looked at me and waited when

  When she urged me to beat her I should have known the game was up, or at least that it soon would be. After such knowledge, and so on. There are moments – yes, yes, despite anything I may have said in the past, there are moments when a note sounds such as never has been heard before, dark, serious, undeniable, a strand added to the great chord. That was the note I heard the day she clutched my wrist and whispered, ‘Hit me, hit me like you hit her.’ I stopped at once what I was doing and hung above her, ears pricked and snout aquiver, lik
e an animal caught on open ground. Her head was lifted from the pillow and her eyes were filmy and not quite focused. Sweat glistened in the hollow of her throat. A vast, steel-blue cloud was sneaking out of the frame of the window and the rooftops shone. At just that moment, with what seemed bathetic discontinuity, I realised what the smell was that I had caught in the basement that first day when she brought me there. My heart now seemed to have developed a limp. In a frightened rush I asked her what she meant and she gave her head a quick, impatient shake and closed her eyes and took a deep breath and pressed herself to me and sighed. I can still feel the exact texture of her skin against mine, taut and slightly clammy and somehow both chill and hot at the same time.

  In the closing days of November a false spring blossomed. (That’s it, talk about the weather.) Bulbs recklessly sprouted in the parks and birds tried out uncertain warblings and people wearing half-smiles walked about dazedly in the steady, thin sunshine. Even A. and I were enticed outdoors. I see us in those narrow streets, a pair of children out of a fairy-tale, wandering through the gingerbread village unaware of the ogres in their towers spying on us. (One of us, certainly, was unaware.) We sat in dank public houses and behind the steamed-up windows of greasy cafés. A. held on tightly to my arm, trembling with what seemed a sort of hazy happiness. I was happy, too. Yes, I will not equivocate or qualify. I was happy. How hard it is to say such a simple thing. Happiness for me now is synonymous with boredom, if that is the word for that languorous, floating sense of detachment that would come over me as I strolled with her through the streets or sat in some fake old-fashioned pub listening to her stories of herself and her invented lives.