Life in the West tsq-1

by Brian W Aldiss

  They paused as the waiter brought in their drinks, a cinzano for Ajdini, a vodka for Squire, on a silver tray also bearing two bowls of nuts and olives. The waiter slid the bill to Squire as if performing a conjuring trick.

  ‘I find yours an elitist argument,’ Ajdini said. ‘Naturally, evolution has no party. People are too busy trying just to live, to survive, to worry over evolution. Who can worry over evolution? Surely you don’t?’

  ‘Well, “elitist” is just a worn-out Marxist term of abuse, isn’t it? Designed to banish thought. I’m trying to establish some sort of historical perspective.’

  ‘Historical perspective is itself a luxury. People with empty bellies care nothing for yesterday or tomorrow.’

  He sighed and raised his glass to her, without sipping, lowering it again to say, ‘We are not people with empty bellies, you and I, so we must cultivate those perspectives. Don’t try to bludgeon me with fake compassion for the starving. You call my background “deeply privileged”; I see it as carrying deep responsibilities — responsibilities for civilized enjoyment as well as duties. Yes, I have good fortune. That is because I have spent most of my life maintaining those values I live for.’ He made a dismissive gesture. ‘I do not expect you to accept those values as worth maintaining; perhaps you would rather destroy them, since they are those shared by many in my social stratum — among them, during his lifetime, Aldous Huxley.’

  He had made his point. Now he drank.

  Looking down at her hand resting on the table, she said, ‘You evidently did not care for my paper this afternoon.’

  Making a slight effort, he said, ‘We’re off duty now.’

  She put fingers to her delicate lips and said, ‘I see you do not want to argue. I wonder why that is?’

  ‘I see you want to argue.’

  As they both chewed olives, she said, ‘However beastly you may find my politics, I am not a dedicated Women’s Libber. Not exactly.’

  He said nothing to that, having learnt that either approval or disapproval of such statements provoked argument.

  After a short silence, she said, ‘Before I was into stylistics, I worked in neurosurgery in Los Angeles. That was when I was fresh out of college, apart from a trip to Mexico, where I saw for myself the poverty and injustice suffered there under American imperialism.’

  She went on, and he continued to look at her, but her words no longer penetrated to his senses. He thought about her being a neurosurgeon, and saw her character differently, regarded her not just as a woman parroting ideology, but as someone vulnerable and dedicated. About her remarkable face, the sharp planes cutting back from her nose, there was something of the scalpel; but he detected a sensitivity previously hidden from him, perhaps a sensitivity to things to which he remained blind. Her priggish phrase about Mexicans suffering under American imperialism represented some genuine experience of pain and distancing which she could interpret only in terms of political theory.

  She was saying, ‘Perhaps you know the name of Montrose Wilder. He was very distinguished in his field. It was a privilege to work with him. A good surgeon. Also a good man.

  ‘When I began as a trainee under him, he had a patient aged about forty, who had been involved in a shooting incident and was suffering from a parietal lesion of the brain. Her name was Dorothy, and she was severely dysphasic.

  ‘Montrose stimulated her hippocampus with an electrode. Dorothy suddenly cried out. She told us that she saw her mother in an orange dress — she relived that forgotten time — her mother in an orange dress walked down a hillside towards her, carrying a basket full of apples. The mother was smiling and happy.

  ‘Afterwards, Dorothy cried a lot. Her mother had died when she was five, and she had lost all conscious memory of her. The electrode had allowed her to relive that fragment of life when she was an infant, untouched by trouble. She was grateful. The memory was a gift from a happier world. A land of lost content…’

  She looked down at her hands. ‘I think I can see now, as I’m telling it to you, that Dorothy perceived a linkage between the mother’s death when she was five and the attempt of a drunken and jealous lover to murder her at the age of forty. All succeeding messes flowed from that first mess…’ She bit her lip.

  He said something sympathetic. Ajdini ignored him, lighting another ‘Drina’ and gazing into the recesses of the room.

  ‘I thought of Dorothy when you spoke about souls. If you have looked into living brains, seen the vulnerable exposed hemispheres, you think ever after in terms of electrical impulses, not of souls.’

  ‘Supposing you look more deeply and see both physiological apparatus, and electrical impulses as God’s handiwork?’

  ‘Do you do that?’

  He laughed.’ No. But I wish I could. I am in the anomalous position of believing in souls yet not in God.’

  ‘So art’s a comfort, eh?’ She was smiling. ‘Not that we don’t need comforting.’

  ‘Art’s many things, isn’t it? A comfort for me, a source of argument for you?’

  A warmth in her smile, as she responded to his teasing, touched something inside him. ‘In the face of such large questions, really art in the twentieth century has little to say. After Kafka — nothing worth having. The Theatre of the Absurd.’

  She indicated the bust which impersonally supervised their conversation. ‘Do you think this cross-eyed general is elevated to the Absurd? Just a few pencil lines make a difference.’

  ‘They do to any of us.’

  ‘Will you have dinner with me, please? If I promise not to convert you to Marxism.’

  ‘I’d love to, but I have to go out.’ Looking at his watch, he added, ‘Now.’

  He noted her immediate curiosity, and added, ‘I have an appointment. Perhaps tomorrow evening.’

  ‘Are you going to a brothel? I hear there are plenty in Ermalpa. Because of the poverty.’

  Laughing, he said, ‘No, nothing like that.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be all English and bashful. If you are going, can I come with you? I won’t spoil your enjoyment, but I’d like to talk to the women.’

  ‘Die Spitze might like that but I wouldn’t. I’m not in the habit of taking ladies to brothels. For one thing, it’s too much like taking coals to Newcastle…’

  She gave him a long look, estimating him. ‘You hardly need to pay for your women, I imagine, Mr Squire.’

  He drank the last of his vodka. ‘Women don’t enter into my plans for this evening, unfortunately. Perhaps things will improve in that respect tomorrow.’

  Leaving the hotel, Squire was immediately enveloped in the hot evening noise of Ermalpa’s traffic. He stood for a moment, reminded of nights in Rio de Janeiro, where a similar mechanical frenzy had prevailed. Something in the Latin temperament caused drivers to project an extended body-image into their machine, converting it to something between a penis and a clenched fist.

  He moved suddenly, turning down side streets which he had memorized from his map, down the Via Scarlatti, down the Via Archimede — very dark and crooked, the Via Archimede — through the Piazza O. Ziino, into the modest avenue next to the Giardino Inglese where the British Consulate stood.

  As he walked through the warm evening, Squire thought over what he had said to Ajdini; as ever, he had hedged on the question of religion. One could never get free of religion, yet wasn’t it all out of date?

  Some three years ago, when Squire was still collecting material for ‘Frankenstein’, he and Teresa had visited the Britannic Centre for Demystified Yoga, to interview its founder, Dr Alexander Saloman. They drove across London to St John’s Wood, where the centre was, and found themselves at a Lebanese house. Two Arab women in white robes, complete with yashmaks, were leaving the building as they entered. A dark man in dark glasses wearing a snappy blue suit was on guard, and let them only reluctantly through a mahogany door.

  Inside, all was heavy and sumptuous and dark. Large black plastic sofas, upholstered with the wet-look, greeted them. On the
walls hung claymores, nineteenth-century sporting prints, and musical instruments from some obscure corner of the East. A gilded lift took them grandly up to the second floor, and to an audience with Dr Alexander Saloman. Teresa held Squire’s arm.

  Dr Saloman rose to greet them. He was dressed in black — black shirt, black pullover, black slacks, black shoes, with incongruous blue socks. He wore ebony-rimmed spectacles. He was possibly in his late forties. The skin of his face was dry and folded, his hair had been reduced to stubble, either by decision or natural erosion. He had been born in Vienna, and had lived in Argentina for many years before founding Demystified Yoga and returning to Europe. They shook hands formally.

  ‘What is the purpose of your television series? Is it merely entertainment?’ he asked Squire, when they had sat down and Squire had refused a Balkan Sobranie cigarette.

  ‘We hope to be entertaining. I want to show people that there are new things in the world to be enjoyed.’

  ‘Why do you come to me?’ The eyes were searching and not unfriendly, though they frequently darted to Teresa, who sat staring at Dr Saloman with her head on one side. One would not trust the doctor with women.

  ‘I practise yoga. I like the way it puts actions before words. To my mind, that’s the right priority. Someone told me you might be interesting.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you say there are old things in the world to be enjoyed?’

  Squire hesitated. ‘Isn’t that obvious? But my series will not be about them.’

  Dr Saloman exhaled smoke. ‘Are you ambivalent about old things?’

  ‘Old ideas, yes.’

  ‘Are you religious, Mr Squire?’ He spoke almost faultless English, without accent.

  ‘I don’t believe in God. Yoga cured my lingering belief. I feel most days that God is within me — if he exists at all.’

  He wanted Dr Saloman’s response to that, but instead the doctor turned sharply to Teresa and asked, ‘Do you believe in God, Mrs Squire?’

  She smiled. ‘We all go to church every Christmas. As a matter of fact, Dr Saloman, I don’t like being asked personal questions. That’s more my husband’s line.’

  ‘We are persons, Mrs Squire. We must sometimes be personal.’

  She laughed. ‘Oh, I’m a very personal kind of person, Dr Saloman; but on the whole only with friends.’

  As she spoke, she shot a glance at Squire; he thought with some approval that she was always able to take care of herself.

  The founder of Demystified Yoga nodded seriously and turned back to Squire.

  ‘So you have a belief in yoga?

  ‘I use yoga because it creates a stillness I enjoy — a stillness in me, I mean. If God exists, he exists in stillness, or so sages have always imagined. Perhaps pranayama is God — the breath of life. Let me ask you a question — do you consider Demystified Yoga a new thing or an old thing?’

  Dr Saloman said, without pause, ‘Is a young oak a new thing or an old thing?’

  ‘I was asking about yoga, not trees.’

  ‘All things connect. Only we have to look for the connections. I am myself a connection. I have to find if that is why you and your wife seek me out. If not, I will not be of use to you. Among other things, I am a connection between East and West, and that is an important connection for our times.’

  He looked squarely at Squire. His mouth was wide and blunt, and bracketed powerfully at either end with lines that ran from the flanges of his nostrils.

  ‘I like both yoga and demystification, Dr Saloman, though I’m not sure whether I like them in conjunction. Why do you see the connection between East and West as important at present?’

  Dr Saloman put the end of his cigarette in the glass ashtray on his desk and spread his palms wide, so that Squire could see he concealed nothing.

  ‘There are answers to suit cases. I will put one to your case. In the West, there are many old dead ideas which people still cling to. For instance, the idea that the poor must struggle to overthrow the rich is long dead; yet it is kept alive by many petty demagogues who have no other slogans to mouth. Once-living ideas die and become embalmed into single words — Marxism, socialism, liberalism, democracy. Of course I don’t speak politically, that’s not my sphere. But this is an age of new possibilities. In different circumstances, we must behave differently in order to think differently. Then salvation is not far away.’

  A door opened, and a young Indian woman in a bright blue and orange sari entered, bearing a tray. She placed the tray before Dr Saloman, and smiled and nodded at the visitors. He watched her with his dark eyes and his blunt mouth as she left.

  While the doctor poured coffee, Squire looked about the room. There were lace curtains at the two tall windows, making the air dim. Everything in the room, including Dr Saloman’s enormous desk, was new, gleaming, foreign. Elaborate psychedelic acrylic pictures adorned one wall; there was also a photograph of somewhere that could have been a clinic in Buenos Aires. Perhaps the birthplace of Demystified Yoga, Squire thought.

  His wife rose, walking over to him and placing a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘I don’t want any coffee,’ she told the doctor.’ I’ll leave you two to talk. I have some shopping I have to do.’

  Squire rose to his feet. ‘We won’t be long, Tess. Hang on.’

  ‘I’ll see you,’ she said. ‘Goodbye, Dr Saloman.’

  Dr Saloman made no comment. He came round the desk and gave Squire a cup of coffee. The cup was small and gold- rimmed; its fragile handle was difficult to grasp.

  ‘My wife gets rather restless,’ Squire said, by way of apology. ‘I’m very interested in what you say about our being surrounded by dead ideas. I was born with a neutral mind, and consequently have trouble in deciding which ideas are alive, which dead. How does a meeting of East and West help? There are plenty of dead ideas in the East.’

  ‘Of course. We need cross-fertilization. I’ll give you another old idea — racialism. But racialism is really ancient, and still has power. It is a true idea although, like Siva, it can be destructive. We must use its power correctly. We must test ourselves on the diversity that still lives between races — use it like a cold shower for our health. Increased travel accords that opportunity. My belief is that inter-racial contact can gradually obliterate fascism and communism and the other -isms by generating new ideas. Have you been to India? You should go at once.’

  ‘It’s not so easy — ’

  ‘Of course it’s easy. For you it’s easy. I can tell it just by the cut of your suit. I also see that you should take your wife with you, for her inner harmony.’

  After their conversation, Squire descended through the Lebanese hall and out into the London street. It was October and the leaves were falling. Everything was tranquil. There was no sign of Teresa. He walked slowly to the car, waiting by a parking meter, and climbed in. He allowed himself to relax and think nothing. Eventually she returned, dangling a carrier bag.

  ‘Sorry if I kept you waiting, darling. I’ve been shopping.’

  She settled herself into the passenger seat and showed him a small glass ornament she had bought.

  ‘That yoga man was too boring. He’s a real phoney — you won’t use him, will you? I couldn’t bear it when he went into religion.’ She rubbed against him and kissed him on his neck.

  ‘Did you have to walk out like that? It was impolite. Salomon was okay. He said that we should go to India.’

  ‘Let’s go back to the hotel. I wasn’t being impolite to him — or you. I just suddenly got fed up with being there. I suppose you would say it was ideological. I went there with you to please you; I sat there to please you. Suddenly I wanted to be central. You and he were having a great conversation, and I was just sitting there waiting for you to finish. I couldn’t bear being an appendage.’

  He looked at her with concern. ‘You weren’t an appendage. I don’t see why you didn’t enjoy it. He was interesting, was our Doctor.’

  ‘Not to me he wasn’t,’ she said.

/>   Squire frowned. ‘Really, Tess. Just for half-an-hour? You’re as involved with religious questions as anyone.’

  She put an arm around him. ‘Tommy, be nice to me. Don’t be grim. Religion’s just not something I wanted to talk about. In any case, I hated the way that man stared at me; he was sinister, and if you’d been a woman you wouldn’t have liked it either. He looks like a murderer.’

  ‘That’s silly, when—’

  She sighed. ‘All right, it’s silly. Let’s go back to the hotel. My feet ache, and I need a drink.’

  As he reached the British Consulate, he thought ruefully, ‘Well, there was a time when I also found religious talk extremely tedious.’ But perhaps that wasn’t what Teresa had been trying to tell him.

  The Consulate was an unimposing building in greying stucco, hiding behind a number of sabre-leaved shrubs which entirely filled the small garden. The gate was locked. He spoke into a grill; the gate opened. He was met at the door by a solid unspeaking man, and shown into a hall whose chief features were a small chandelier and a portrait of the Queen and Prince Philip.

  In a minute, James Rotheray appeared, rubbing his hands and smiling with his head slightly on one side in a manner that Squire remembered from schooldays. They shook hands. Rotheray put an arm round Squire’s shoulders and led him through the house to an enclosed courtyard where two men were sitting drinking. Rotheray introduced them to Squire and then led him to another table.

  ‘Lovely to see you, Tommy, you’re looking first-rate.’

  ‘And you, Sicily evidently agrees with you.’

  ‘Sicily’s splendid, full of antiquities. Getting a bit grey round the temples.’

  ‘Me too. And a bit thin on top. Do you still run?’