by David Malouf
I am growing bodiless. I am turning into the landscape. I feel myself sway and ripple. I feel myself expand upwards toward the blue roundness of the sky. Is that where we are going?
The earth, now that I am about to leave it, seems so close at last. I wake, and there, so enormous in their proximity to my eyeball that I might be staring through tree trunks into an unknown forest, are the roots of the grass, and between the roots, holding them together, feeding them, the myriad round grains of the earth, so minute, so visible, that I suddenly grasp the process by which their energy streams up through the golden stems. They are almost transparent, these fine long stalks. One can stare right through them and see the sap mounting in bubbles. They are columns of light, upright channels by which the earth feeds itself to the sky. And at their summit, so far-off they seem unreachable, the feathery grass heads plumping and nodding in the breeze, into whose sweet seeds all the richness of the earth ascends.
Round the base of these roots, seeking refuge amongst them as in a forest, finding food, are the smaller creatures – wood lice, ants, earwigs, earthworms, beetles, another world and another order of existence, crowded and busy about its endless process of creation and survival and death. We have come to join them. The earth’s warmth under me, as I stretch out at night, is astonishing. It is like the warmth of another body that has absorbed the sun all day and now gives out again its store of heat. It is softer, darker than I could ever have believed, and when I take a handful of it and smell its extraordinary odors I know suddenly what it is I am composed of, as if the energy that is in this fistful of black soil had suddenly opened, between my body and it, as between it and the grass stalks, some corridor along which our common being flowed. I no longer fear it. I lie down to sleep, and wonder if, in the looseness of sleep, I mightn’t strike down roots along all the length of my body, and as I enter the first dream, almost feel it begin to happen, feel my individual pores open to the individual grains of the earth, as the interchange begins. When I wake I am entirely reconciled to the process. I shall settle deep into the earth, deeper than I do in sleep, and will not be lost. We are continuous with earth in all the particles of our physical being, as in our breathing we are continuous with sky. Between our bodies and the world there is unity and commerce.
Perhaps that is why the breaking of the earth around us into the newness of spring seems, this time around, to be occurring at the very end of my nerves. The furriness of the little round catkins we discover on occasional bushes, the stickiness of new leaves that begin as a glossy finial and suddenly unfold out of themselves as tiny serrated heart shapes, all this, at such close range, seems miraculous, and so too is the exploding into the air of so many wings. A membrane strains and strains, growing transparent, till the creature who is stirring and waking in there is visible in all its parts, forcing its own envelope of being towards the breaking point till with its folded wings already secure in the knowledge of flight, and of all the motions of the air, it flutters free. The whole earth creaks and strains in the darkness. The sounds are tiny, but to an ear that has been laid close to the earth, entirely audible. I think sometimes that if I were to listen hard enough I would hear my own body breaking forth in the same way, pushing at the thin, transparent envelope that still contains it, that keeps it from bursting forth into whatever new form it has already conceived itself as being, something as different from what we know as the moth is from the chrysalis.
The Child too seems to me to have a new being out here, and I no longer ask myself what harm I may have done him. He too has survived his season among men. Some new energy is in him. He is lighter. He moves faster over the earth. He is alert to every shift of the wind and mood of the sky as it carries the weather of tomorrow and the day after towards us, to every scent of the hundred grasses and herbs and fat little buds that spread around us their invisible particles. It is these grasses and their parasites, the worms, the grubs, the small winged grasshoppers, that provide us with nourishment. The Child gathers them where they hang, feeding in their chains above the earth, one creature grazing, taking in goodness, and passing on into another’s mouth. We are at the end of the chain. Each day early, the Child hunts, feeding me now out of his world as I once fed him out of ours.
I watch him standing, at dusk, at the edge of whatever place we have found to rest for the night, staring out northward into the immensity of grass.
Does he know what lies out there? Is he returning to some known place, and leading me there? Each day now I have less and less strength to push on towards whatever goal it is – unannounced yet, among the miles of grass – that we are headed for. Does he know where he is taking us? I feel his impatience to be moving, even as he stands at dusk, perfectly still against the reddening sky, casting his eye forward to where we will be, at the crest of that further rise, at this time tomorrow night. I watch him, and wonder what it is in his mind that gives our journey purpose. His whole body strains toward some distance that I cannot grasp from where I lie in the shade. He is full of it, of some suppressed passion for the furthest reaches of what he can see, and I feel that, glowing in him, as he stoops to bring me whatever he has found for us to eat, patiently sorting seeds for me, or showing me how to tackle water snails, or squeezing drops of water out of a piece of rag to wet my lips. He seems closer now than I ever thought possible. In those early days it seemed inconceivable that he should discover in himself this tender kinship with men that is visible now in every moment of his concern for me.
And yet for all this closeness, he seems more and more to belong to a world that lies utterly beyond me, and beyond my human imagining.
It is as if he moved simultaneously in two separate worlds. I watch him kneel at one of his humble tasks, feeding me, or cleaning up my old man’s mess. And at the same time when I look up, he is standing feet away, as when I first saw him in the pinewood, a slight, incandescent figure, naked against the dusk, already moving way from me in his mind, already straining forward to whatever life it is that lies out there beyond our moment together, some life I have not taken into account, and which he will be free to enter only when our journey together is done. I have tried to induce out of the animal in him some notion of what it is to be human. I wonder now if he hasn’t already begun to discover in himself some further being. Is he, in fact, as the villagers thought (their view was always simpler than mine, and perhaps therefore nearer the truth) some foundling of the gods? Is it his own nature as a god that his body is straining towards, at this edge of his own life where any ordinary child might be about to burst into manhood, and into his perfect limits as man? He moves out of sight, hovering there, vague and glowing, just beyond the capacity of my eye to distinguish what it sees. And at the same time, with bent back, he squats on his haunches, his grimy hands with their cracked and broken nails working to prepare the food I can barely swallow now. He takes infinite pains over it, half chewing the fibrous tubers to make them palatable and feeding me the pulp, as he must have seen animals do with their young.
And so we come to it, the place. I have taken my last step, though he does not know it yet, as he moves away as usual to forage for our evening meal. From here I ascend, or lower myself, grain by grain, into the hands of the gods. It is the place I dreamed of so often, back there in Tomis, but could never find in all my wanderings in sleep – the point on the earth’s surface where I disappear.
It is not at all as I had imagined. There are no wolves. It is clear sunlight, at the end of a day like each of the others we have spent out here, a fine warm spring day with larks in the air, and insects shrilling under our feet. The Child is here. I watch him moving away along the edge of a stream, stooping, kneeling, starting off again with his spring-heeled gait as he gathers snails amongst the weeds.
Strange to look back on the enormous landscape we have struggled across all these weeks, across the sea, across my life in Rome, across my childhood, to observe how clearly the footprints lead to this place and no other. They shine in my head, al
l those steps. I can, in my mind, follow them back, feeling myself with each step restored, diminished, till I come to the ground of my earliest memories again, and am standing in the checkered light of olives at the very edge of our farm, with wings glittering beyond the low stone wall and a goatherd dozing against one of the olives, his rough head tilted back and all the throat exposed, as if he had been dozing like that, just as I last remember him, for nearly sixty years. One of the goats, which is black, has just jerked up on to its hind legs to munch at a vine shoot. It is spring. It is summer. I am three years old. I am sixty.
The Child is there.
He turns for a moment to gaze at me across his shoulder, which is touched with sunlight, then stoops to gather another snail from the edge of the stream. He rises and goes on. The stream shakes out its light around his ankles as he wades deeper, then climbs on to a smooth stone and balances for a moment in the sun, leaps, leaps again, then wanders upstream on the other bank, which is gravel, every pebble of it, white, black, gray, picked out and glittering in the late sunlight as in a mosaic, where he pauses, gathers one, two, four snails, and with the stream rippling as he steps in and out of it, walks on, kicking at the gravel with his toes and lost for a moment in his own childlike pleasure at being free.
I might call to him. I have the voice for that. But do not. To call him back might be to miss the fullness of this moment as it is about to be revealed, and I want so much, at the very end here, to be open to all that it holds for me.
The fullness is in the Child’s moving away from me, in his stepping so lightly, so joyfully, naked, into his own distance at last as he fades in and out of the dazzle of light off the water and stoops to gather – what? Pebbles? Is that what his eye is attracted by now, the grayest, most delicately veined of them? Or has he already forgotten all purpose, moving simply for the joy of it, wading deeper into the light and letting them fall from his hands, the living and edible snails that are no longer necessary to my life and may be left now to return to their own, the useless pebbles that where they strike the ground suddenly flare up as butterflies, whose bright wings rainbow the stream.
He is walking on the water’s light. And as I watch, he takes the first step off it, moving slowly away now into the deepest distance, above the earth, above the water, on air.
It is summer. It is spring. I am immeasurably, unbearably happy. I am three years old. I am sixty. I am six.
I am there.
AFTERWORD: A NOTE ON SOURCES
We know very little about the life of Ovid, and it is this absence of fact that has made him useful as the central figure of my narrative and allowed me the liberty of free invention, since what I wanted to write was neither historical novel nor biography, but a fiction with its roots in possible event.
What we do know comes from the poet himself: the place and date of his birth, the death of a brother one year older than himself in early youth, and of course the famous exile – though we have no explanation of why it was imposed. Ovid is very much an actor, inclined to exaggerate for effect, so very little of what he tells us is reliable. I have used his poem of exile, Tristia, for my picture of Tomis and have drawn on Book III of Fasti, his study of the chief Roman festivals, for details of the Parilia. My hint for the Scythian graves is in Herodotus.
The encounter with the Child, which makes up the main part of this book, has no basis in fact, but I have verified my description from the best account we have of such a phenomenon, J.M.G. Itard’s painstaking observations of Victor, the wild boy of Aveyron, which no writer on the subject can ignore. Itard’s involvement is that of the teacher, and growing as it does out of the eighteenth century, his interest is chiefly in the problems of innate and learned experience. It was partly to break into a field of more open possibilities that I set my narrative in a remote place about which almost nothing is known, and in an age, the dawn of the Christian era, in which mysterious forces were felt to be at work and thinking had not yet settled into a rational mode.
At a time when the Roman period had been sunk for nearly a thousand years in impenetrable obscurity, Ovid became a popular figure of mythology and the search for his grave resulted in the veneration of several legendary but spurious sites, some of them as far from his original place of exile as central Hungary. The actual date of his death, and its cause, remains mysterious.
To the Renaissance reader Ovid was the most modern of the Latin poets, the most worldly and accessible, the most human, his skepticism balanced by a love of the fabulous, the excessive. It is this modern quality I have tried to recreate, though the fate I have alloted him, beyond the mere fact of his relegation to Tomis, is one that would have surprised the real poet, since it attributes to him a capacity for belief that is nowhere to be found in his own writings. But that is exactly the point. My purpose was to make this glib fabulist of ‘the changes’ live out in reality what had been, in his previous existence, merely the occasion for dazzling literary display.
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Copyright © David Malouf 1978
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