‘And are you Catholic or Protestant?’ she said. What was this new minefield? I took a step. ‘Well, Protestant,’ I said. ‘Oh, that explains it,’ said Yvonne and looked relieved. ‘Ever since grandfather Andrew lapsed, the Catholics and the Protestants haven’t spoken. That explains it.’ Good.
‘And do you by any chance know of any other Yvonne in the family—about your age?’ I asked. Risky but worth it. Here Yvonne got interested. She knew of an Edna, a Sophie (was it?), a Maude … but no, no Yvonne, sorry … Well, maybe it did ring a small bell—something about a dress-shop—but no, not really … why did I want to know? ‘I seem to remember my parents being friendly with an Yvonne just after the War,’ I lied.
And so we smiled and said how very interesting, how nice to have met, some other time perhaps, we really ought to … She was to retire in just a few months, I should ring … And down I went in the lift and back to work, still stunned, but differently. I felt put in my place. In time I even forgot this not-my-mother’s married name.
In the end, though, Peg’s chance meeting with Yvonne that day forged the link I lacked between my mother and myself. It took some time, some thought, and some courage, on both our parts, and the story didn’t end as either of us might have thought it would with tears, unbounded joy, completeness, pumpkins turning into golden coaches. But then, it hasn’t ended.
I’ve often thought about the element of chance in this, of course—how could you not? Chance is dangerous because it subverts the most rational of personal philosophies. But I couldn’t help thinking later, when the false Yvonne was replaced by the true, if Peg had stopped another woman, if she’d been held up at the traffic lights and got there ten seconds later, if I’d not asked Peg but someone else to review that Mexican novel, if I hadn’t met Peg in Mexico City, if I hadn’t got that job at the ABC, if, if, if … Pointless, I know, and no doubt quite wrong-headed. Life simply isn’t linear like that. It’s much more curved.
Let me describe to you a city I know well, but you could not be expected to. The old town, where some of the zigzagging streets are still cobbled and the castle keep called Mokkó still stands intact and grey-black on the highest point, is on a promontory at the mouth of a small but swiftly flowing river. If we walk north from the keep, away from the sea (a choppy strait, with the mountains on the offshore island clearly visible to the south in good weather), we come to a more ordered, European part of the city—almost like Helsinki, really, with gracious Palladian buildings (mostly ochre and cream, but some duck-egg blue) enclosing thinly planted squares and lining well-planned streets. There are a few cafés and restaurants dotted about the streets here but if it were lunchtime and we wanted a more crowded, bohemian atmosphere we might head more east towards the escarpment above the river. This is the part of the city that was ‘outside the walls’ in an earlier century, so the streets are narrower and more crooked and the buildings quainter and pokier. There’s the odd glimpse across the river below to pines and sand-dunes on the other bank. If you wanted something more up-to-date—shopping malls, glass and chrome delis, that sort of thing—you’d have to go northwest from the centre, out into the suburbs stretching between the sea and the mountains just a few kilometres inland. Down on the sea on the other side of the promontory from the river is a pleasant little bay—in fact, that’s what it’s called in the local language, The Little Bay—with a promenade and some expensive private houses with lush gardens on the hill behind. It’s quite a high hill—well, it curves round to form the promontory—so if you’re down on the promenade at the water’s edge you can’t see the mountains hemming in the city from the north or the magnificent monastery, almost a Potala, soaring up brown and white and sheer above the foothills. Idyllic, really, although the winters can be severe.
This city does exist, but not quite in the same way as, say, Vancouver or Wellington. I don’t wish to sound mystical, but it’s existed for me since I was a small boy of about six, pottering around in the backyard where the bush came up through the chook-yard to the edge of the back lawn. It was there in that backyard I started to imagine my own Pure Land. It wasn’t just a fantasy or a game I played there with myself; it was and still is a parallel world.
Not long ago I stood looking at a Tibetan painting of Shambhala in the Royal Academy in Piccadilly. Shambhala is a word which changed over the years in English to become Shangri-la, which sounds more evocative to our ears, I suppose, but also more vulgar. At the centre of this painting is a round, white city, Shambhala, the Pure Land. To the eye it’s Lhasa-like, clustered on a mountain like a flock of goats. There are no people in this round city, just houses and pavilions and a maze of alleys. Around this city, this Pure Land where perfection and non-being are somehow one, lies a ring of mountains, then a ring-shaped sea, then another ring of mountains and another sea—seven rings of mountains in all and seven seas. I stood immersed in this Tibetan painting for a very long time. It meshed quite miraculously with the pure lands I’d inhabited in my mind most of my life—like my secret island it’s the embodiment of myth and at the same time ‘real’, lying just off the coast of India—and it also meshed with the sense I have of a more circular inner geometry.
I say that because, as a Westerner, I’ve been brought up to see life as linear, sequential and consequential, as heroic or tragic, modelled ideally, perhaps, on Jesus of Nazareth’s or less loftily on any adventurer’s. Yet deep down I know that a life can be pictured, construed, made sense of in terms of a completely different geometry altogether. With nothing at its core. I’m no mystic—there’s a kind of Gallic rationalism in me so deep-seated I can’t meditate for more than five minutes without tumbling into analysis and measurement and the prisonhouse of language—but this Tibetan painting seemed to me to map my life in a way more conventionally dramatic geometries did not.
Like the painting in the Royal Academy, my Shambhala too had streets and houses, rivers, lakes and mountain ranges and was an island. Already at six I could have drawn you a street map of the main city (severely rectilinear) and pinpointed it for you in my school atlas: it was (and is) just south of the Aleutians in the North Pacific. For tuppence in those days you could take home books from the musty one-roomed shop at the edge of the local shopping-centre we called the Library. I often borrowed books about the Arctic, especially Iceland and Greenland. There weren’t many, so I took home the ones they had many times and I think the map of Iceland impressed itself on my consciousness early on and helped to shape my own Land. I hesitate to tell you what I call it—it’s not that it’s sacred or a secret, it’s just that I want to keep it pure. And I fear your scorn.
Perhaps it’s a case for psychiatric intervention, but over the four decades since I first drew a map for myself of the Righteous City—all right, call it K.—with its righteous rectangles, its parks and squares and public ponds, my Pure Land has not clouded over and disappeared from view as it ought to have done, but has grown denser and more economically and politically complex, and my map of the city has spread into a map of the island. And across the island snake railway lines (I used to know the timetables) and roads both paved and unpaved, there are airports, hospitals, castles, police academies, monasteries, prisons, cafés, theatres, bridges, mines, hotels, even benches in particularly sunny spots on certain promenades. I can tell you the rates at the health farm in the mountains near the Blue Lake or take you on a tour of the Buddhist monastery on a clifftop in the south. I can recommend certain cakes in a café in a town called V. (oddly enough, a mainly Russian Orthodox town and an important site of Orthodox pilgrimage) and run through the family history of the eighteenth-century rulers of the district of B. I live there, after all. Even as I write this, I realise I’m being careful not to tell you a single untruth.
A lively imagination in thrall to a single obsession, you’re thinking to yourself, The Magic Faraway Tree gone pathological. Possibly so, but not a total waste of time. It took about twenty years for me to realise that through the matrix of this imagined Mot
herland, unaware of what I was doing, I was working out and articulating to myself all sorts of religious, philosophical, sexual, psychological and other problems. While studying one religion, for example, in my everyday life, I was actually elaborating and entertaining other religious philosophies which flourished in my land (more gnostic in tenor, although I didn’t know the word). While eating meat I could debate radical vegetarianism as provincial government policy on an offshore island. As my distaste for Eastern European socialism strengthened, I could write articles defending it in my head for the Party daily newspaper in the north of my Land, where a Communist government had been in power since 1947. A fortified border cut the island (and my psyche) in two. It came down several years before the Germans demolished theirs, at about the time I settled down with P.
But it gets madder. When I was about eleven I started reading up on artificial languages—Esperanto, of course, but also Volapük, Pirro’s Universal-Sprache, Interlingua and other concoctions. I was starting to learn Latin and Russian, already spoke a little French, and for £2/1/6 I bought myself a copy of Frederick Bodmer’s Loom of Language: a Guide to Foreign Languages for the Home Student. So while other little boys were playing cricket in the street after school or going to Scouts or torturing small animals, I was comparing Greek script with the Cypriotic syllabary, musing on sound changes in medieval French and learning quite a lot about the differences between Swedish and Danish, not to mention Dutch, from the fascinating word lists in the Language Museum at the back of the book. All this must have been having some effect on the sort of teenager I was becoming.
One effect, apart from a complete lack of interest in cricket or indeed in playing any kinds of games with little boys, even cards, was the immediate need I felt to create a Pure Language for my Pure Land. I would set up my own loom and weave my own language. Now, many children make up private languages, I know—sisters talk with brothers in secret codes, only children compile private vocabularies, prepubescent fraternities have their ritualistic gobbledygook and so on. But starting from the age of about eleven I began to do something much more ambitious and, I suppose, eccentric: I began to construct an Indo-European language of enormous grammatical and morphological complexity, with a history going back to pre-Roman times in Asia Minor, sound shifts, three scripts (one syllabic, thanks to the Cypriots), two main dialects and several regional variations on those dialects. If I’m alone and in a compulsively Pure-Landish mood, I’ll chat to myself in this language (the dialect depends on the persona I’m entering) and certainly all my dogs have heard a lot of it. As far as I know, no one else has ever heard or read a word of it. (Well, you’ve actually read one word, mokkó (n., neut. sing, nom.): ‘a small keep’ (from the root mok- ‘to close off’).
This is madness sprouting madness, you must be thinking. I suppose it is in a way, but my rational self seems powerless to stop it. It just proliferates in my head like a vine. Part of me lives there and has done for over forty years. Although I do remember making resolutions on significant dates (my twenty-first birthday, for example, my thirtieth birthday, a New Year’s Eve or two) to give it all up like masturbation, to put it away like some childish thing, it’s not something I can just swear off.
English is filtered through it all the time. I make myself translate almost everything I hear—phrases from conversations, the titles of books and films, news items, advertisements. Obsessively, I force conjunctions to occur between language systems. Meaning only occurs in conjunctions, after all—words and things, words and words, words and memories (the universe and God, for that matter). If something just hangs in a vacuum (like a godless universe) it has no meaning as such at all. So I hear a phrase like ‘right and wrong’, for example, and think to myself: now, how would I say that in my language? And immediately I’m aware that ‘right and wrong’ are just English words with a history. They’ve been applied to different things at different times in different social contexts, of course, and whatever translation I choose can’t be expected to come with the same baggage. The history of my Land is, after all, very different from England’s, as are its mores, its value systems and its social structures. And so, as I try out this word and that (bearing in mind, let’s say, that both the English ‘wrong’ and the French ‘tort’ have to do with twisting), groping for a way to express this phrase in my own tongue, I become intensely aware of how relative and personal concepts like right and wrong are, how socially determined, and how imprisoning knowing just one language can be. And over the years that’s been true of many key words in my psychic development—obvious ones like ‘good’, ‘evil’, ‘God’ and ‘love’, over which I’ve battled with myself for decades, but also more peripheral ones like ‘home’, ‘friend’, ‘intelligence’—yes, and even ‘mad’. This kind of awareness changes absolutely everything. It was having to say to myself in my own language ‘I love him’, ‘he loves her’, ‘I love rhubarb’, ‘I love Mozart’ and ‘God loves me’ that first made me ponder what love means. These are lengths mad Billy Liar did not go to with his fantasies about the Republic of Ambrosia. But Billy Liar, unless I’m mistaken, was trying to escape from a dreary middle-class post-war England. I don’t think I was trying to escape from anything.
In some ways all I was trying to do by spending part of my time in a parallel world was to belong somewhere, to give myself a history I had some control over. I’d known ever since I could know anything that I didn’t come from where I was. Wisely or unwisely, Jean and Tom had told me before memories begin that my mother and father had not been able to keep me and that they, Jean and Tom, had wanted to have me very much because they couldn’t have their own children. So on the one hand I seemed to have landed on my feet while on the other, from a very early age, I was confronted with the fact that there are times when people must abandon those they love. As I grew older I seem to remember the story changed a little: my father had died in an air-crash and so my mother had married someone else. (Strangely close to the truth, as it turned out, but not something Jean and Tom should have known.) I was also told my mother’s maiden name and that it was French. Once Jean even cut a photograph out of the social pages of the Daily Telegraph showing a group of smiling middle-class women one of whom was a Dessaix. She came from a nearby Sydney suburb. I remember feeling intrigued but not deeply moved.
On hot afternoons on the back verandah Tom, now sixty-odd, would sit learning French from phrase books and grammars in order to speak to me in French—and not just passez-moi le beurre, s’il vous plaît, either. Given that he’d left school at about twelve in 1901, the son of pub-owners in Port Augusta, this was no mean achievement. And it went further: he took out a subscription to Le Courrier australien and joined a society for French-speakers, something rather more demotic than the Alliance française—sailors from French ships used to appear at the get-togethers (les amicales, they were called), songs were sung and long rambling stories were told, just the sort of thing Tom revelled in. And when Jean went back to work we had a cleaning-lady from Noumea I used to talk to in French—a small-boned, waspish woman who pursed her lips so tightly I could hardly understand a thing she said.
None of this was affectation, it was generosity of spirit, it was an offering. Tom was a man with a big, soft heart and a kind of Irish love of words and the games you can play with them. Satu, dua, tiga, empat, lima … I see him again now, in his old Hawaiian shirt and shorts, sitting on the back verandah with the races switched off, teaching me to count to ten in Malay, which he’d picked up in the merchant navy forty years before, and then in Pushtu, which he’d learned from the Afghan camel-drivers passing through Port Augusta in the 1890s. He wasn’t averse to telling my mother and me over dinner what ‘thank you very much’ was in Cantonese, either, or in Russian (he’d been to Vladivostok before the Revolution), a habit which seemed to nettle Jean. She took delight in mispronouncing his French phrases—oh, mercy buckets, she’d say, or Quel horror! It’s pleuting! We weren’t fazed.
It was moving to thin
k that I had been abandoned by a beautiful French mother (‘pretty and petite’ was how Jean put it—I scarcely wondered how she knew) and by my brave and handsome father the pilot. He always remained nameless and mysterious—all I knew about him was that the almoner at the hospital where I was born had thought him ‘very good-looking’. What was moving to me as a child was the story, not the facts. The idea of being reunited with my mother, strange as this may seem, did not much interest me. At least, not in real life. Of course, I used to fantasise that my father was King of Bessarabia and that my kingdom would be restored to me, that out there somewhere, perhaps on the next tram I caught or standing in line at the fish shop, were brothers and sisters who looked exactly like me (no one else seemed to, after all) and who would reclaim me right there on the tram or in the fish shop. And when for some years in the late ’fifties I worked in a large city bookshop during the Christmas school holidays, I used to dream that one day a woman would come up to me with a book and say: ‘Charge it, please, to Yvonne Dessaix.’ What on earth would I say? I was moved by the scene in my head, and went over and over it, but I don’t know that I really wanted it to happen in real life, right there in Paperback Fiction.
Much more interesting than meeting my mother by then, in my mid-teens, during stolen moments in Foreign Languages, was encountering Jean-Paul Sartre in French. And André Gide soon followed (Si le grain ne meurt, L’immoraliste and others). This gave rise to a shadowy Impure Land in my head. French and France were suddenly cloaked in deviance and desire, eroticised, not just by sexuality, but more powerfully, perhaps, by being simply so deeply knowing. Over there they knew. Over there they knew things and said things (in French) no one ever seemed to know or say where I came from. I had led a rather sheltered adolescence.
Mother's Disgrace Page 3
