An Imaginary Life

by David Malouf

  Today, while I was washing him, he laid his fingertips, with a kind of timid curiosity, on the back of my hand, feeling the texture of the skin – then drew back quickly, as if I might object and punish him. The effect was odd and a little frightening. As if an animal had come up in the dark and touched me with its tongue. Is he beginning to feel at last for some notion of his own being? Is it, for him, like touching his reflection in a glass? Has he, I wonder, any conception of what his own body is, what it looks like, what dimensions it possesses, how it displaces its own small part of the universe? Is it his body he must imagine first, and only after that come to a knowledge of what he is?

  There is an intelligence. I feel it. More and more often now, as I settle into some work of my own, writing for example, I am aware of a separate center of energy in the room that disturbs my thoughts, that sets up eddies that beat like waves of light towards me and break against the edge of my consciousness. The room, I know, is filled with emotions that are not mine only, thoughts, not mine, that leap into the still damp atmosphere of a late morning where I sit scribbling and the boy, taut as a spring, watches out of his corner – the beginnings of a restlessness of mind, of body, that is the stirring in him of renewed life.

  He is, after all, a child. He needs activity. His body needs to express itself in movement and his mind to reach out and touch and test things.

  He has been here now for nearly two weeks. After those first three days when he slept, when his soul tried to bury itself in the earth, and these last days when he has lived in a state of half-sleep, he has begun to move again into wakefulness, into the full alertness of his youth. Yesterday, while I was out of the room briefly, he must have touched my writing materials. The ink was spilled. I sopped it up without giving any indication that I knew he had been tampering with things; refilled the pot; found my place in the roll. And almost burst out laughing to see that his tongue was blue.

  Being out of the room again today, I stood just beyond the door frame and watched.

  He shuffles across the floor towards the parchment roll and stares at it, pokes at it with his forefinger, then lowers his head and sniffs. How it must puzzle him that the roll still smells of animal hide. Once again the ink fascinates him. He sniffs at that also, but is careful not to spill it. He takes the stylus in his hand, and has been observant enough to grasp it clumsily, but correctly, between thumb and forefinger. He looks pleased with himself. He dips it in the ink, finding great difficulty in getting the pen, balanced as it is between his fingers, into the hole. He crouches over the pot, and there is on his face that look of utterly human concentration that one sees on the faces of small children when they are trying for the first time to draw, or make strokes for writing or thread a needle – the eyes fixed, the tongue pointed at the corner of the mouth and moving with each gesture of the hand, as if it too were one of the limbs we have to use as men, one of our means of pushing out into the world, of moving and changing its objects. Is that perhaps where speech begins? In that need of the tongue to be active in the world, like a hand among objects, grasping, pushing, shaping, remaking?

  Watching behind the door these first attempts of the Child to handle the objects of his new world, I find my eyes wet with tears. There is something in our humanity, in the slow initiation of the creatures of our kind into all that we have discovered and made – in ourselves and in the world around us – that is always touching like this; one feels it in the first efforts of the child to push itself upright, to push that one step up that it must have taken our ancestors centuries to imagine and dream of and find limbs for; or in the first precarious placing of one block upon another to make a little tower, the beginnings of a city. All those ages of slow discovery. Relived by the child in just a few months, as he makes use of experience he can never himself have had, and which must lie latent in him, in the lives under his own of thousands long dead, whose consciousness he has somehow brought with him into the world. How much more moving then to see my Child make the discoveries that will lead him, after so many years of exile, into his inheritance, into the society of his own kind.

  I have for several days now left his hands free. At last, this morning, I untie all his bonds. They are no longer necessary. All that will tie him to us, to a new life, is invisibly there, he must feel it: the web of feeling that is this room, the strings – curiosity, a need to find out the usefulness to him of all these objects that surround him, and the way they define him and illuminate the uses of his own body – these are the threads that hold him now, and along which his mind must travel to discover how he is connected to us, to the bowl, the water scoop and bucket, the sponge I use to wash him and which he has already begun to use himself, the ink pot, stylus and parchment, the colored ball I have placed casually where his eye cannot miss it, and which, since I never touch it, he must already have realized is his. I feel his mind moving out towards these things. I feel, even in darkness, the invisible twitching of strings.

  For some reason, in these long hours of sitting with the Child, watching him move slowly out of himself, trying to imagine myself into his skin so that I will discover how it is I must lead him into his lost childhood, I have found myself more and more often slipping back into my own childhood – also lost until now, or rejected; certainly long forgotten. I fall into some timeless place in myself where the past suddenly reoccurs in all its fullness, or is still in progress. I am there again. I make contact with a self so surprising that I can scarcely believe it is me. I touch again on an experience that I recognize as mine only because its vividness can only be that of life lived in recall. Imagination could not present to the mind, to the senses, anything so poignantly real.

  Of course all men put their childhood behind them. It is part of discovering a new self in manhood. But I have done so more than other men, I think. The simplicity of those early years at Sulmo fitted so ill with my new role as man about town, as sophisticated poet of the metropolis, that I should have felt only anxiety and some sense of disgust if I had tried to reconcile the two. For the same reason I found it painful to see my father, who remained disappointed in me – even after my literary reputation might have been enough to make up to him a little for my failure to become a man of affairs. He married again and had another family. And that too made it easy for me to keep away. I lived, after the end of my second marriage, as if I had sprung into the world complete with my first book of poems, an entirely new type, the creature of my own impudent views and with no family behind me, no tribe, no country, no past of any kind.

  And now it all comes back to me.

  Especially, and with feelings of an extraordinary tenderness such as I have not known for so long now that I cannot recall the last time they can have swept over me, certain evenings from my earliest childhood when we were turned over, my brother and I, to the women of the household, the farm servants, to be washed and dressed for bed, along with their own children, boys and girls both, who are of an age with us and are still at this time (since we have not yet learned to distinguish them as slaves) our playfellows in the farmyard and in the olive groves and orchards beyond.

  In the big stone-flagged kitchen under the beams there are tubs of warm water and suds, and we children, perhaps a dozen or more, are splashing about together or paddling in pools on the floor, all shrieking and starting away wherever one of the women, their arms already holding the big fluffy white towels, reaches out and makes a grab for us. It is, to me, a scene of golden beauty and cleanliness. I feel my whole spirit washed at the thought of it: the clean naked bodies, the white towels, the women laughing and holding out their bare wet arms.

  In these harvest days we are allowed to sleep out in the farmhouse with our nurse. My mother, who is sickly, and whose head aches with hay fever, has retired to her room and never appears. My father goes out each morning with the harvesters, and if the work is far off on the other side of the valley, he will stay out with the laborers overnight. We are put to bed with the others, on huge straw mattre
sses behind the kitchen, and lie awake while the women tell us stories about wood spirits and demons older than our Roman gods, who live in odd corners of the house and barn and must be placated with lumps of dough (which they come for in the guise of a mouse) or with herbs that only the oldest and wisest of the women know how to gather, high up in the hills.

  This is a woman’s world, which I will never know again. It smells of soapsuds and dough, of curds, of the raw wool I watch the older women carding on a terrace wall in the sun, with the fields behind them a glitter of wings. Early in the morning, almost before it is light, we go out together in a party, women and children, to the water meadows, to gather big orange-yellow mushrooms. I watch the women, who are barefoot, haul their skirts up in the dew while they squat to piss, their heads upright under the straw panniers, and later, on our way home, look on scandalized when, in the stubbled field, they stop and make mocking obeisance to the scarlet-stained figures of Priapus that are set in the midst of the wheat to scare off birds. Back in the yard, there are eggs to gather from under the hens in their wooden houses. There are pigs to feed. There is grain to be winnowed by shaking it in the air in a basketwork sieve. In the coolness of the kitchen, late in the afternoon, there are millet cakes to bake and to prick afterwards with a straw so that they will soak up honey. And then, after dark, the bathing.

  I watch again as one of the girls, her skirt hitched up over her bare legs, her arms gleaming wet, takes my brother by the prick and leads him round the tub like a goose, while all the women throw their heads back and laugh, and the children splash and clap their hands and toss suds in the air. And I realize suddenly, nearly fifty years after the event, that this must be the girl my father is sleeping with. I see her lead my brother, the little heir to all this world, round the sopping kitchen floor while the women show their gapped teeth and hold their sides and laugh. It is a vision of utter joyfulness; and I am at the center of it, understanding, for the last time perhaps, a little of its mystery.

  It is another world. How strange to find myself back there for odd moments, knowing that I have made nothing of whatever it was that was being revealed to me then – that I went some other way, into a man’s world, into the city, into the state, as my brother too went another way, to death.

  But stranger still is that all this time it has remained there, untouched, unrecalled, but still brightly new – and so real that I smell the raw cleanness of it still.

  I think also, in these quiet hours, of my brother’s death during the Parilia, just after our birthdays, which fall on the same day.

  We have always been close, though our temperaments are so different; he is serious-minded, and filled with a deep sense of loyalty to things, to my father, to the farm, whose every boundary stone he knows, to the family, which is so closely bound up with the country here, the old tribal lands of the Peligni. He is deeply pious, in a way I respect and envy, but having taken on early my role as the frivolous one, I do as I am expected to do, and tease him about it.

  For days he lies ill and cannot speak. He is just eighteen. I sit with him in a room off the courtyard, where he lies sweating on a daybed, breaking out in cold shivers, then burning. I read to him a little, but he cannot attend. I hold water to his lips and feel my hand trembling as he drinks. I weep and am ashamed of it. When the day of the Parilia comes I go out heavy-hearted as the twilight gathers to do the duty that is his, to do it for him, as he would do it, and am aware as I cross the yard of the women’s eyes on me, and as I stride out across the fields to where the little fires are already blowing in the dark, I know that if I allow myself even for a moment to believe in the ceremony I am about to perform, as he does, I will have replaced him, made him superfluous, since I will be assuring the gods (who do not exist) that I am there to take his place.

  I wade uphill through the yellow grass, hardening my heart, though this in fact is a festival I have always loved, ever since I first went out on my father’s shoulder to watch the fires lit and to see the men’s shadows leaping amongst the corn.

  I too know all the boundary stones of our land, but to me they mean something different. They are where the world begins. Beyond them lies Rome and all the known world that we Romans have power over. Out there, beyond the boundary stones, the mystery begins. My mind ventures out, touches the old worn boulders for luck, and then goes on in the dark, populating the unknown with what must be imagined since it cannot be seen. For my brother, I know, the farm and his mind are one. The stones glow at the edge of what he is: these fields that have been cleared of their pebbles and terraced, these ancient olives, with their gnarled trunks so thick that you can hide in them, as the wood spirits do, these vineyards, beehives, slopes of corn streaming with light under the moon. I walk through all this, feeling the grass heads brush my bare legs, and arrive at the field where my father is waiting.

  He has already made his course and is drying his body with a cloth. I kiss him. I let a slave loosen my cloak. I sip from the pail of milk. Take in my hand the beanstalk and the ashes of the calf. My father dips a laurel branch in water and sprinkles me with it. He is weeping. My chest, my brow. I blink under the shower of little drops.

  The heaps of straw are kindled all the way down the field for me to leap over, and as I sprint away and go flying over the first of them, feeling the rush of air into my lungs, feeling the joy of it, the leaping, the being cleansed and gathered into the web of things, smoke from the straws, dusky twilight, nightjars swooping after insects among the pines, the springing of the young plants under me, I know that it has happened – I have let some grain of belief in all this sprout in my mind, and killed him. My brother is dead. I feel it as a fact in my limbs, in their weariness as I come round to the start, in my own breathlessness as I lean forward, hands on hips, and gasp for air. I feel it, guiltily, in the glow that comes to my body after the exercise. I have run my brother’s death. When they sprinkle me a second time with the laurel and I start back across the darkening fields, feeling my sweat dry in the breeze, it is to what I know has already occurred. I stop at the entrance to the yard and listen for the first wailings from the house, and hear them, the women’s voices. Sitting at the edge of the field, in the dark, I loosen my sandals. I strew my shoulders, my legs, my hair, with earth and know obscurely what it is I am about. I am trying to wipe out the purification that was his, I am atoning for my own moment of belief.

  So these things happen, deep in our lives. We do not speak of them. We hide them even from ourselves, but they do not leave us. For all our mockery of the earth we have come from, it covers us, we creep back to it, to its thickness on our limbs, its grit in our mouths. I killed something in myself on that night and tried to cover it with earth. Now it cries out in me again. I find myself wishing that I could talk to my father once more, after all these years of estrangement, and tell him that I have found my way back to that country I will never see again and am at home. I have admitted at last its claims upon me. I know where I was born.

  And that brings my mind back, as always, to the Child. What is his country? What is his parentage? At what moment did he push out into the world, under what star sign, with what planet in the ascendant, in what ephemeris of the moon? And if he does not know these things can he ever know who he is or what his fate is to be?

  Or does not knowing make him free?

  Each morning now we go out, the Child and I, to practice our lessons in the open, where the boy and the women of the house cannot listen.

  The Child carries the colored ball, which has become his talisman, his first possession among us; he never lets it go. In sleep he curls up around it. While eating he places it in the crook of his knee as he squats cross-legged with the bowl in his lap, handling awkwardly, at last, the wooden spoon I have taught him to use. When we are out walking he carries the ball in his left hand.

  I avoid the places where we are likely to come across people from the village: women beating their clothes on the pebbles or laying them out to dry in the thornbr
ush; men driving their ox ploughs to the narrow fields at the edge of the stockade where our meager crop of oats is grown.

  I avoid too the little grove to the west which is sacred to the women, and where at certain phases of the moon they sacrifice to Hecate with the entrails of a dog.

  This leaves only the swampy land towards the river.

  I take off my sandals (the boy goes barefoot, and bare except for a loose robe, which he tears off as soon as we are out of sight of the village) and we wade through the rushes to a turfy island covered with scrub and a few stalks of wild oats; and there, each morning, with the swamp birds invisible around us, creaking and calling, or climbing heavily into the watery sky, and the frogs tinkling, we begin.

  I am teaching the Child to speak.

  It is a difficult process. I have long since discovered on our expeditions together that he can imitate any of the birds or animals we come across, and he delights in showing off to me how he can whistle like the big hawks we see occasionally floating high up under the clouds or throw his voice, pic pic, against the bole of a tree, like the woodpeckers of my childhood, the sacred spirits of our Sulmo countryside. He stands with his feet apart, hands on hips, head held back to the light, and his lips contort, his features strain to become those of the bird he is mimicking, to become beak, crest, wattles, as out of his body he produces the absolute voice of the creature, and surely, in entering into the mysterious life of its language, becomes, for a moment, the creature itself, so that to my eyes he seems miraculously transformed.

  Sometimes he uses his hands like an instrument to trill and flute, blowing across his fist and fluttering his fingers. At other times the cry simply floats out of him, high and clear, or the warbling comes from deep in his throat, a guttural murmuring, or his body suddenly gives forth a metallic creaking so that I am startled by its closeness. It is as if each of the various bird species – ground pigeons, crows, waders, high-flying migratory birds that have been who knows where over the horizon – had their life in him and could be drawn out on the breath between his lips; as if he had some entrance to their mysterious comings and goings among the grasses, or had been with them to the bottom of the river where the water birds dive after their prey, or in the high places of the air where imagination fails to follow them or to catch with the ear how their cries are translated at the margin of the stars.