An Imaginary Life

by David Malouf

  Observing how he makes these sounds, and the sound of frogs, cicadas, rabbits, the low growl of wolves and their fearful baying, I get some clue at last to how he may be taught to speak.

  His whole face is contorted differently as he assumes each creature’s voice. If he were to speak always as frog or hawk or wolf, the muscles of his throat and jaw might grow to fit the sound, so intimately are the creatures and the sounds they make connected, so deeply are they one. It is through the structure of his own organs of speech then that he must learn to communicate. If I can reveal to him their physical shape he will discover their use.

  For this reason, as I make the sounds I want him to imitate, and which he finds such difficulty in drawing up to his lips, I place his fingers on my throat so that he can hear the buzzing of my voice there, I lay his fingertips to my lips so that he can feel the shape of them, the flow of breath. Gradually, one sound at a time, we are finding human speech in him. It is a game he delights in. He is childishly eager to show me that he can imitate me as well as the creatures. With his fingertips at my lips, his brow furrowed, listening, he discovers the shape of his own lips, and the sound is almost perfect. He takes his hands from my throat and places them on his own, and laughs outright when he feels at last the same buzzing there and hears the sound; astonished at first, as if he didn’t know where it came from, then jubilant, making the same sound over and over again in his triumph, with little whoops between.

  I have begun to understand him. In imitating the birds, he is not, like our mimics, copying something that is outside him and revealing the accuracy of his ear or the virtuosity of his speech organs. He is being the bird. He is allowing it to speak out of him. So that in learning the sounds made by men he is making himself a man. Speech is the essential. I have hit at the very beginning on the one thing that will reveal to him of what kind he is. In making those buzzing sounds he discovers his throat. In intoning through his nostrils he realizes that he has a nose, and behind it, caverns where the sound reverberates. And so on for lips, tongue, teeth. As he builds up the whole range of sounds that we make, he is building up in his own head the image of head, checking and rechecking with his fingertips against my throat, my jaws, my lips, that he is made as I am, that he is man.

  But what head is it that his imagination is creating?

  What is it, finally, that I can lead him to imagine and then to become?

  And having built up the whole repertory of sounds, what language am I to teach him?

  Meanwhile we proceed with simple manual skills. I teach him to throw and catch the ball. He is quick at this and at all body skills and soon begins to play tricks on me, perceiving that I am neither as quick of eye nor as sure of hand and foot as he is. I teach him to cast a javelin, to thread and use a needle. He himself tries to hold a stylus and make marks with it. Strangest of all, he has learned to smile. Not simply to laugh in response to some clumsiness of mine as I dart about after the ball, but to smile, as we do, out of some state of his own soul, a sudden lighting up of the spirit in him that has no object and no cause. He also assumes, on our walks, the role of teacher, pointing out to me tracks in the grass and explaining with signs or gestures of his body, or with imitation sounds, which bird or beast it is that has made them. Or finding under the mold of a log a grub or chrysalis, he explains with his hands how it will be a moth, acting out in a kind of dance its transformation.

  All this world is alive for him. It is his sphere of knowledge, a kind of library of forms that he has observed and committed to memory, another language whose hieroglyphs he can interpret and read. It is his consciousness that he leads me through on our walks. It flickers all around us: it is water swamps, grass clumps, logs, branches; it is crowded with a thousand changing forms that shrill and sing and rattle and buzz, and must be, in his mind, like the poems I have long since committed to memory, along with the names of a thousand gods and their fables, the rules of rhetoric, theorems, the facts of science, the facts of history, the theories of the philosophers. Only for him it is a visible world he can walk through, that has its weathers and its seasons, its cycle of lives. He leads me into his consciousness and it is there underfoot and all about me. How can I ever lead him into mine?

  I have come to a decision. The language I shall teach the Child is the language of these people I have come among, and not after all my own. And in making that decision I know I have made another. I shall never go back to Rome.

  No doubt I will go on writing to my wife and my attorney. I shall even go on addressing Augustus, begging him to forgive my crimes and recall me. Because in one-half of my life that is what is expected of me, it is the drama I must play out to its conclusion. But in the other half of my life I know that if the letter came, recalling me, I would not go. More and more in these last weeks I have come to realize that this place is the true destination I have been seeking, and that my life here, however painful, is my true fate, the one I have spent my whole existence trying to escape. We barely recognize the annunciation when it comes, declaring: Here is the life you have tried to throw away. Here is your second chance. Here is the destiny you have tried to shake off by inventing a hundred false roles, a hundred false identities for yourself. It will look at first like disaster, but is really good fortune in disguise, since fate too knows how to follow your evasions through a hundred forms of its own. Now you will become at last the one you intended to be.

  So I admit openly to myself what I have long known in my heart. I belong to this place now. I have made it mine. I am entering the dimensions of my self.

  How all this has begun to happen is a mystery to me. It begins at first, perhaps, in our dreams. Some other being that we have kept out of mind, whose thoughts we have never allowed to come to the tip of our tongue, stirs and in its own way begins to act in us. A whole hidden life comes flooding back to consciousness. So it is that my childhood has begun to return to me. Not as I had previously remembered it, but in some clearer form, as it really was; which is why my past, as I recall it now, continually astonishes me. It is as if it had happened to someone else, and I were being handed a new past, that leads, as I follow it out, to a present in which I appear out of my old body as a new and other self.

  So too, in my lessons with the Child. When I try to articulate what I know, I stumble suddenly on what, till that moment, I did not know. There are times when it comes strongly upon me that he is the teacher, and that whatever comes new to the occasion is being led slowly, painfully, out of me.

  We are moving in opposite directions, I and the Child, though on the same path. He has not yet captured his individual soul out of the universe about him. His self is outside him, its energy distributed among the beasts and birds whose life he shares, among leaves, water, grasses, clouds, thunder – whose existence he can be at home in because they hold, each of them, some particle of his spirit. He has no notion of the otherness of things.

  I try to precipitate myself into his consciousness of the world, his consciousness of me, but fail. My mind cannot contain him. I try to imagine the sky with all its constellations, the Dog, the Bear, the Dragon and so on, as an extension of myself, as part of my further being. But my knowing that it is sky, that the stars have names and a history, prevents my being the sky. It rains and I say, it rains. It thunders and I say, it thunders. The Child is otherwise. I try to think as he must: I am raining, I am thundering, and am immediately struck with panic as if, in losing hold of my separate and individual soul, in shaking the last of it off from the tip of my little finger, I might find myself lost out there in the multiplicity of things, and never get back.

  But I know now that this is the way. Slowly I begin the final metamorphosis. I must drive out my old self and let the universe in. The creatures will come creeping back – not as gods transmogrified, but as themselves. Beaked, furred, fanged, tusked, clawed, hooved, snouted, they will settle in us, re-entering their old lives deep in our consciousness. And after them, the plants, also themselves. Then we shall be
gin to take back into ourselves the lakes, the rivers, the oceans of the earth, its plains, its forested crags with their leaps of snow. Then little by little, the firmament. The spirit of things will migrate back into us. We shall be whole.

  Only then will we have some vision of our true body as men.

  So day by day, as I teach the Child to put sounds together and make words such as men use, he teaches me to make the sounds of the birds and beasts.

  At first it was a game I allowed to humor him. My self-consciousness, the awkwardness of my attempts, made him laugh, and that in itself, the sudden breaking out of the child in him, delighted me, and the notion that we were both playing the same game made it easier for me to keep him involved in the long, slow, difficult task I have set him.

  But he, in fact, is the more patient teacher. He shows me the bird whose cry I am trying to imitate. He makes me hold it, trembling in my hands. I know what he intends. I am to imagine myself into its life. As the small, soft creature beats its warmth into me, I close my human mind and try to grow a beak, try to leap up out of myself, defying the heaviness of my own flesh, the solid bones, and imagine what it is to soar out of the wet grass towards the clouds. A strange piping comes from my throat, small bird cries, and the Child clasps his hands and makes the sound himself, encouraging me, bringing me closer to it, the simple scale that is the bird’s individual being.

  And it is true. Each day brings me closer. Once, in the early days of my desolation, I thought I might learn to write in the language of the spiders. Now, led by the Child, I am on my way to it. The true language, I know now, is that speech in silence in which we first communicated, the Child and I, in the forest, when I was asleep. It is the language I used with him in my childhood, and some memory, intangibly there but not quite audible, of our marvelous conversations, comes to me again at the very edge of sleep, a language my tongue almost rediscovers and which would, I believe, reveal the secrets of the universe to me. When I think of my exile now it is from the universe. When I think of the tongue that has been taken away from me, it is some earlier and more universal language than our Latin, subtle as it undoubtedly is. Latin is a language for distinctions, every ending defines and divides. The language I am speaking of now, that I am almost speaking, is a language whose every syllable is a gesture of reconciliation. We knew that language once. I spoke it in my childhood. We must discover it again.

  The season begins to change. Already when we go out these days, to our island in the swamp, I have to wrap up against the wind, which for nearly a month now has blown steadily from the north, though the Child still goes naked, and seems unaffected either by wind or cold. Shadows gather out of the scrub earlier and earlier each day. The light is grayish. The birds who have been our companions out there begin to flock away. Each day there are fewer of them and at dusk, making our way back across the flat watery landscape, we hear the geese flocking south, great waves of them beating across the sky and filling the heights with their honking cry. The beasts have crawled away into the earth to sleep. I feel a slowing in the Child also, and half believe that the secret of his winter survival will be revealed at last. One morning I shall find that he too has taken himself away into some deeper sleep, like the one that filled those first three days after we found him.

  Meanwhile the village is being turned into a fort. Men are out in groups repairing the stockade. The last of the harvest has been brought in and garnered. The byres that are open and empty all summer are being stocked with feed, and in a few weeks now, the beasts will be led in, the oxen, cows, asses, goats, to be stabled under the rooms where we sleep, and when I climb down in the morning there will be their warm breath in the darkness there, the smell of their stale, the sound of their nuzzling and feeding. The yard is piled high with stacks of square-cut peat, and wagons laden with it rumble up the lanes between the huts, with men – or more often half-naked children – yelling and switching the oxen to encourage them uphill through the oozing mud. We are preparing to shut ourselves in. Against the horsemen from the north, who will surely appear again as the river freezes, and against the wolves. In each one of us there is this sense of withdrawal into ourselves, this retirement into the body’s secret light and warmth, out of the coming cold; this moving further into some deep inner self that must remain untouched by the closeness that will be forced upon us in these winter months, when first the town is shut up, then our houses, and except for snatches of duty on the walls, we will spend the days and nights equally, huddled together above the one peat stove in the big central room over the byre. Winter here is a time of slow-smoldering resentments, of suspicion, of fantasies that grow as the days move deeper into the year’s darkness and the cold drives us closer together and yet further apart.

  I am anxious, especially, for the Child. Up till now we have lived apart from the family in my summer outhouse, not quite separate, since the room adjoins the main sleeping rooms of the hut, but able at least to come and go as we please and to see as little of the others as the smallness of our compound allows. I realize, now, how much in these last weeks I have cut myself off, how much I have made my life with the Child the entire limits of my world. Now all that is at an end. My little outhouse will be turned over to the spiders. A week after the first snow it will be all but buried. How will the Child endure our being cooped up in a single room? Will the women, and the boy, accept him?

  I mention my anxieties to old Ryzak as we sit, in the late light of the courtyard, over a game these people play with a wooden tablet and pegs.

  He is winning as usual, and trying, with his down-drawn mouth and moustache, which he strokes with a stubby forefinger, not to look pleased with himself, though I am too poor a player to offer much challenge. He pretends to find a puzzle where there is none, wags his finger at me, and makes his move.

  ‘No no, my friend, you must trust me. They will not trouble the boy.’

  But I am not convinced. I am inclined to think that for all his position as headman, and for all his quiet assumption of authority, Ryzak holds less sway over the village than he would have me believe, and less sway, also, over the house. Behind his male prerogative, established in law, lies the darker power of the women. The old woman his mother, especially, has a strange ascendancy over him. He shouts at her, and once or twice I have seen him strike her. But his spirit quails before hers, I feel it. In some darker area of belief, it is her demons, the old spirits she mutters to under her breath and sacrifices to by moonlight, who are the powerful beings of this world, and Ryzak knows it. He is scared of her magic, as he is scared also of the shaman. All he has on his side is bodily strength and the authority, such as it is, of the law.

  The old woman remains hostile and suspicious. I watch her lips move as she ladles our gruel into bowls, and wonder whether she is simply talking to herself or muttering spells. She has a great reputation in the village as a worker of enchantments, and scarcely a day passes without the village women calling to consult with her on the question of a strawberry mark, or a harelip, or a difficult birth. I have even, on one or two occasions, seen a young man come lurking about, shifting from foot to foot at the gate as he prepares to submit himself to the dangerous world of women’s magic. Seeking no doubt a love philter or a charm against mildew or the early dropping of his lambs. She is sometimes to be glimpsed, when we got out to our island, gathering herbs among the wormwood scrub or reading messages out of places in a field where the grass forms circles made neither by beast nor man. I know that she spies on me. She believes, I think, that I am some sort of rival wizard – is that what poet means to her? – who is using the Child to make a different and more potent magic. Her mutterings over our gruel are meant to sing the goodness out of the grains, so that our spirits will find no nourishment in them. But she is too wary of her son to practice directly against us.

  Her ally in all this is the boy, Lullo. He is jealous, I know, because he has been replaced as my pupil – though I have several times offered to return to our lessons. He
refuses to come near me, and proclaims loudly that he has no use for Latin or for the simple mathematics I have tried to teach him.

  The old man looks rueful. He would like his grandson to acquire these accomplishments but cannot, out of pride, allow any suggestion of his own deficiency. Silently, with his leathery features puckered up in an expression of clownish apology and helplessly affronted dignity, he begs me not to be insulted by the boy’s impudence, to sympathize, if I can, with his difficulty. He tells Lullo he is a lout, and cuffs his ear; but gently, and with the suggestion that in choosing loutishness, he is remaining loyal to his own people, and especially, to his uncivilized but unloutish grandfather. The boy accepts the blow as it is intended, with a superior smile in my direction, and swaggers off.

  Ryzak shakes his head, makes a mouth, shows me the palms of his hands. The old woman, magnificently justified, celebrates my defeat with a squawk of triumph, and scuttles off to prepare an infusion of herbs in boiled water which she serves with a pantomime of such insolent and exaggerated politeness that Ryzak feels bound to declare the tea undrinkable, and tosses the bowls and their contents into the yard.