An Imaginary Life

by David Malouf

  I walked on the river, which swirled like smoke under me, and I was moonlight. I came to the further bank. A vast plain stretched away, flat, flat, featureless, it was all dust, swirling beneath me, and out of the dust no creature stirred, not a serpent even. It was original.

  Suddenly, not out of the dust of the plain but out of the swirling sky, a horde of forms came thundering towards me – men, yes, horses, yes, and I thought of what I do not believe in and know belongs only to our world of fables, which is where I found myself: the centaurs. But these were not the tamed creatures of our pastoral myths. They were gigantic, and their power, the breath of their nostrils, the crash of their hooves, the rippling light of their flanks, was terrible. These, I knew, were gods.

  In whom I also do not believe.

  I stood silent in the center of the plain and they began to wheel in great circles about me, uttering cries – not of malice, I thought, but of mourning. Let us into your world, they seemed to be saying. Let us cross the river into your empire. Let us into your lives. Believe in us. Believe.

  Slowly they came to a halt.

  Stood.

  Breathing.

  There was a silence, vast as the plain, and I heard my own heartbeats, like the faintest echo of their hooves, and my own breathing like theirs, only closer, tearing at my chest. And one of those creatures, out of the shadowy forces that blocked out the whole horizon above me, came slowly, putting its hooves down gently in the dust, towards me, and halted just a foot away, so that I felt its breath, its warmth, and thought I heard on the flow of its breath a sound whose syllables I could interpret. Once again, it was the tune that I recognized. As if, having no language of my own now, I had begun to listen for another meaning.

  I put out my hand, touched it.

  And something came out of the depths of my sleep towards the point where we stood facing one another, like a reflection rising to the surface of a mirror. It was there, outside me, a stranger. And something in me that was its reflection had come up to meet it.

  I woke, cried out. And the word I uttered was not in my own tongue.

  I have tried since to remember that word, but the sound has sunk back into my sleep. If I could recall that sound, and speak the word again, I think I would know what it is I have named, what it is that I have encountered. What it is out there that is waiting to receive me.

  Called Naso because of the nose.

  What my ancestor had a nose for I do not know. What I had a nose for was news – what was fashionable, what would go.

  I am essentially a social creature. Some poets, Vergil for example, have an ear perfect in every way. I have a nose. And noses are political, even when all you are putting them into are the most private places. Perhaps most political just then. Noses get you into trouble. I could sniff out too well what everyone wants to hear, has begun to think, and will think too, once I have said it.

  After a century of war in which whole families had destroyed one another in the name of patriotism, we were at peace. I stepped right into it – an age of soft self-indulgent muddle, of sophisticated impudence, when we all seemed to have broken out of bounds at last into an enlightenment so great that there was no longer any need for belief.

  ‘The gods are not quite dead’ was my news from the universe, ‘since their names are on all our lips – not to mention the monuments to them that are dedicated daily by our beloved leader. But they too have ceased to be serious. They have entered the age of play. They have abandoned the holy places and taken up residence in fables that require only our amused detachment from disbelief. They would be embarrassed by anything so glum and humorless as our grandfathers’ piety. We are free at last to believe in ourselves. Since there are no rules, we must make some. Let them be absurd! Since there are no more restrictions, we invent them. May they be perverse! . . .’ And so on, in the same vein.

  I was discovering for my generation a new national style. No more civic virtues – since we all know where they lead. No more patriotism. No more glorification of men at arms. No more guides in verse to bee keeping and sheep drench and the loves of shepherd boys with a taste for Greek. My world was strictly personal, a guide, in good plain terms, to such country matters as can be explored in the two square meters of a bed.

  The emperor has created his age. It is called Augustan, as our historians, with their eye fixed firmly on the present, have already announced. It is solemn, orderly, monumental, dull. It exists in the eulogies that are made for him (to which I decline to contribute) and in marble that will last forever.

  I too have created an age. It is coterminous with his, and has its existence in the lives and loves of his subjects. It is gay, anarchic, ephemeral and it is fun. He hates me for it.

  Of course in the short run Augustus wins. And the short run is now. I have been relegated – that is our nice word for it – to the limits of the known world, and expelled from the confines of our Latin tongue.

  But in the shadow of a portico dedicated by his sister to her faithful husband, someone tonight is being fucked; because in a poem once I made it happen, and made that particular act, in that particular place, a gesture of public defiance. Each night now Augustus thinks of it and bites his thumb. There are places closer than the Black Sea where the emperor’s power stops. The Portico of Marcellus is one of them.

  But I am here, and all this, all of it, is far behind me. How foolish it now seems, my irony, my little impieties, my dancing on the tightrope over the abyss. I have smelled my way to the very edge of things, where Nothing begins. That’s where a Nose gets you. I sniff and sniff and there is no news from out there, and no news from in here either. I am dead. I am relegated to the region of silence. All I can do is shout.

  And that is what I am doing.

  I walked up and down the stony shoreline under the cliffs, whose shadow divides the shingle into distinct segments of light and dark. I walk among the fishermen, shouting – watching them haul in their glittering surprises, their nameless catch, from out of the sea. Or I stride about in the brushwood on the cliff tops, flapping my arms against the cold, watching storms push up black out of nowhere, or great streams of thistledown and flock travelling white on the wind, and I launch my shouts.

  It’s a long way to Rome. If they are ever to hear me again I must raise my voice and let these torrents of dark air that flow west over the plains carry me with them. I have been silenced. But will not be stilled.

  How can I give you any notion – you who know only landscapes that have been shaped for centuries to the idea we all carry in our souls of that ideal scene against which our lives should be played out – of what earth was in its original blackness, before we brought to it the order of industry, the terraces, fields, orchards, pastures, the irrigated gardens of the world we are making in our own image.

  Do you think of Italy – or whatever land it is you now inhabit – as a place given you by the gods, ready-made in all its placid beauty? It is not. It is a created place. If the gods are with you there, glowing out of a tree in some pasture or shaking their spirit over the pebbles of a brook in clear sunlight, in wells, in springs, in a stone that marks the edge of your legal right over a hillside; if the gods are there, it is because you have discovered them there, drawn them up out of your soul’s need for them and dreamed them into the landscape to make it shine. They are with you, sure enough. Embrace the tree trunk and feel the spirit flow back into you, feel the warmth of the stone enter your body, lower yourself into the spring as into some liquid place of your body’s other life in sleep. But the spirits have to be recognized to become real. They are not outside us, nor even entirely within, but flow back and forth between us and the objects we have made, the landscape we have shaped and move in. We have dreamed all these things in our deepest lives and they are ourselves. It is our self we are making out there, and when the landscape is complete we shall have become the gods who are intended to fill it.

  It is as if each creature had the power to dream itself out of one
existence into a new one, a step higher on the ladder of things. Having conceived in our sleep the idea of a further being, our bodies find, slowly, painfully, the physical process that will allow them to break their own bonds and leap up to it. So that the stone sleeping in the sun has once been molten fire and became stone when the fire was able to say, in its liquid form: ‘I would be solid, I would be stone’; and the stone dreams now that the veins of ore in its nature might become liquid again and move, but within its shape as stone, so that slowly, through long centuries of aching for such a condition, for softness, for a pulse, it feels one day that the transformation has begun to occur; the veins loosen and flow, the clay relaxes, the stone, through long ages of imagining some further life, discovers eyes, a mouth, legs to leap with, and is toad. And the toad in turn conceives the possibility, now that it can move over the earth, of taking to the air, and slowly, without ever ceasing to be toad, dreams itself aloft on wings. Our bodies are not final. We are moving, all of us, in our common humankind, through the forms we love so deeply in one another, to what our hands have already touched in lovemaking and our bodies strain towards in each other’s darkness. Slowly, and with pain, over centuries, we each move an infinitesimal space towards it. We are creating the lineaments of some final man, for whose delight we have prepared a landscape, and who can only be god.

  I have seen the end of all this, clearly, in imagination: the earth transfigured and the gods walking upon it in their bodies’ light. And I have seen the earth, as you have reader, already prepared for it, since our minds can conceive, our hands fashion, what we are not yet ready to enter: cornfields a fathom high, stacked in the sunlight, swaying under the moon; olive groves blowing from green to silver in a breeze, as if some god spoke the word silver, and his breath in passing over the scene transformed it with the turning of the leaves. You know all this. It is the earth as we have made it, clearing, grafting, transplanting, carrying seeds from one place to another, following no plan that we could enunciate, but allowing our bellies to lead us, and some other, deeper hunger, till the landscape we have made reveals to us the creature we long for and must become.

  I know how far we have come because I have been back to the beginnings. I have seen the unmade earth. It is flat and featureless, swamp in summer, a frozen waste in winter, without a tree or a flower or a made field, and only the wildest seeds growing together in their stunted clumps or blowing about at random on the breeze. It is a place of utter desolation, the beginning. I know it like the inside of my head. You can have no idea how far we have come, or how far back I have been to see all this; how rudimentary our life is in its beginnings.

  And yet even here there are stirrings of new life. The first seeds are there to be separated and nurtured, and led on their long path to perfection.

  Out walking today in my old sandals and cloak, with a straw hat to keep off the sun, stumbling about talking to myself in the muddy waste towards the river, I was stopped in my tracks by a little puff of scarlet amongst the wild corn.

  Scarlet!

  It is the first color I have seen in months. Or so it seems. Scarlet. A little wild poppy, of a red so sudden it made my blood stop. I kept saying the word over and over to myself, scarlet, as if the word, like the color, had escaped me till now, and just saying it would keep the little windblown flower in sight. Poppy. The magic of saying the word made my skin prickle, the saying almost a greater miracle than the seeing. I was drunk with joy. I danced. I shouted. Imagine the astonishment of my friends at Rome to see our cynical metropolitan poet, who barely knows a flower or a tree, dancing about in broken sandals on the earth, which is baked hard and cracked in some places, and in others puddled with foul-smelling mud – to see him dancing and singing to himself in celebration of this bloom. Poppy, scarlet poppy, flower of my far-off childhood and the cornfields round our farm at Sulmo, I have brought you into being again, I have raised you out of my earliest memories, out of my blood, to set you blowing in the wind. Scarlet. Magic word on the tongue to flash again on the eye. Scarlet. And with it all the other colors come flooding back, as magic syllables, and the earth explodes with them, they flash about me. I am making the spring. With yellow of the ox-eyed daisy of our weedy olive groves, with blue of cornflower, orange of marigold, purple of foxglove, even the pinks and cyclamens of my mother’s garden that I have forgotten all these years. They come back . . . though there was, in fact, just a single poppy, a few blown petals of a tissue fineness and brightness, round the crown of seeds.

  Where had it come from? I searched and searched but could find no other. The seeds must have blown in and taken root. But from where? From the sea – carried high up in a stream of luminous dust and let fall among us. Or in the entrails of some bird on its way north, and growing out of the bird’s casual droppings as it passed.

  I sit on the ground and observe it. I love this poppy. I shall watch over it.

  Suddenly my head is full of flowers of all kinds. They sprout out of the earth in deep fields and roll away in my skull. I have only to name the flowers, without even knowing what they look like, the color, the shape, the number of petals, and they burst into bud, they click open, they spread their fragrance in my mind, opening out of the secret syllables as I place them like seeds upon my tongue and give them breath. I shall make whole gardens like this. I am Flora. I am Persephone. I have the trick of it now. All it needs is belief.

  And this, as I might have guessed, is how it is done. We give the gods a name and they quicken in us, they rise in their glory and power and majesty out of minds, they move forth to act in the world beyond, changing us and it. So it is that the beings we are in process of becoming will be drawn out of us. We have only to find the name and let its illumination fill us. Beginning, as always, with what is simple.

  Poppy, you have saved me, you have recovered the earth for me. I know how to work the spring.

  It is about to begin. All my life till now has been wasted. I had to enter the silence to find a password that would release me from my own life.

  And yet the words were already written. I wrote them years ago, and only now discover what they meant, what message they had for me: ‘You will be separated from yourself and yet be alive.’

  Now I too must be transformed.

  II

  IT IS ALMOST evening. We sit, the old man, the child, his mother and myself, in the last warmth of the sun in the yard behind our wooden palisade.

  It is bare, this yard, with benches, a rack where gourds hang from strings to dry in the sun, and laid out in a circle, the stones the women use for grinding. The old woman, the headman’s mother, never joins us here. Instead she mutters about in the room behind, occasionally shoving her head, with its toothless jaw, through the little opening and telling us, I gather, how cold it is, and warning the younger woman that the boy should be wrapped up or in bed. Sometimes she just leans on one bony elbow and listens, startling us with her sudden laughter.

  This is the quiet time of the day when the harder tasks are over, the hour before bed. Big clouds move fast overhead, and there is a wind blowing from the north, from the steppes, with the cold edge of the river upon it. Leaves go flying up in spirals above the fence poles. But out of the wind, in the late sunshine, it is warm.

  We have eaten our supper out here: soup made out of nettles, a goat’s milk cheese flavored with herbs. The bowls are beside us on the earth. The young woman is at work again, sewing strips of rough hide to make a cloak. Her bare feet spread out before her and the hides over her knees, she is sweating a little – at the throat, along the line of her upper lip – and she stops occasionally to push the wet hair from her brow with the back of her hand. She catches me looking at her and meets my eyes with her own. She has stopped being scared of me, or puzzled, or even amused. I am just another member of her father-in-law’s household, where she is a stranger like myself now that her husband is dead. She is listening to the old man, who is telling the boy a story as he works away at a net. I too listen. I am
the only one here who is idle, and I let the strange words fill my head, understanding nothing, but fascinated nonetheless to hear the old man assume some other voice than his own, deeper, gruffer – the child’s eyes open in wonder – or a high-pitched womanish voice that makes the child lift up his shoulders and giggle and draws from the old woman behind us one of her crowlike caws.

  The old man’s story is full of wonders. Is it, I ask myself, about a wolf? A bear? Some demon spirit? The young woman, who has heard all this before, watches the child in anticipation, laughing when he laughs and catching my eye so that I laugh too. When the old man’s voice evokes – what? – a wizard, one of the gods? – her fingers stop working a moment and her eyes darken.

  Somewhere deep in myself I know this story. I have heard it before. In childhood. From one of our slaves perhaps, though in another language. It is the tune that I recognize.

  The old man’s voice weaves through the air as it darkens around us. We are moving into winter, into night. His hands, which are square and roughened, work steadily at the net. He is a craftsman. I recognize that. One sees immediately the sureness of his touch. He is too deeply absorbed in his story, in his working of the net, to be aware of us, except when the child laughs or touches his knee a moment in fear.

  I call him old, though we must be pretty much of an age, and I am not yet fifty. The harshness of his life, and the rigors of this place, have weathered and tanned and lined him so that he has the appearance, to a Roman eye, of a man of seventy. Blocky, tough as I have never been, with his shaven head and whiskers, he has an air of stern nobility.

  I try to imagine his life, that must year after year have run parallel to my own, but no image appears. I cannot conceive of his childhood, or his youth, or picture the dead woman who was his wife, and whose grave outside the village I have seen him stop at once or twice on his way home from the harbor. His life, year after year, must have been just what I see now, work, sleep, work. And yet it seems mysterious to me, since what is not accounted for in it is his dignity, which makes me feel foolish and giddy. My life has been so frivolous. Brought up to believe in my own nerves, in restlessness, variety, change; educated entirely out of books, living always in a state of soft security, able to pamper myself, to drift about in a cloud of tender feelings, and with comfortable notions of my own intelligence, sociability, kindness, good breeding; moved by nothing that I couldn’t give a name to, believing in nothing I couldn’t see; never for a moment challenged by more than a clever boy can handle, who has learned early (too early perhaps) to turn all questions with elegance and a gloss of style – what can I know of the forces that have made this man, this tamer of horses, whose animal nature he somehow takes into himself and gentles? There is in his eyes, in his speech, in the powerful slowness with which he moves, something of the vast steppes from which they come, those horses, these tamers of horses, who when they die are not buried like other men but are left to ride above the earth in leagues of air.