A Very Private Life

by Michael Frayn

  One day Noli doesn’t get up. He sleeps on while the queens prepare food and slap the children. Worried that he might be ill, Uncumber makes interrogative gestures in his direction, but the queens just shrug their shoulders and say, “Sisni.”

  After she has eaten, Uncumber goes and sits by his bed, partly out of anxiety for him, partly out of pleasure at having him in sight during the day. He sleeps with his mouth open; she can see the moist pink palate and the gaps among his top teeth. One arm is flung sideways, with the hand hanging over the edge of the bed, each stubby, hardened, dirt-ingrained finger curled delicately over a handful of empty air.

  She studies each visible part in detail, little shocks of excitement running through her at their wornness, at the signs of their long and close contact with the world. Everything about him has been shaped by that contact. He is an artifact of reality! He stirs, and a foot emerges from the bedclothes right next to her—a worn, eroded foot with the little toe crushed in against the rest, where the boots he usually wears press upon it. The callused skin underneath is bright yellow, and on top there are hairs. Hairs on a foot! A rank smell rises from it. Uncumber would like to bend down and press her face against it.

  About the middle of the morning Noli wakes up. The soft white eyelids roll back suddenly, and the gentle brown eyes gaze up at the ceiling, blinking sightlessly, naked and unashamed, unaware of Uncumber’s gaze. The tip of a leathery tongue appears and licks the dry lips. The tongue disappears, the Adam’s apple moves up and down several times, and a groan labours out into the world. Then the eyelids fall shut again.

  Uncumber watches the whole drama, entranced, ashamed to be seeing those sweet private eyes naked in the presence of others, but excited too, and greatly stirred by the appearance of the tongue and the movements of the Adam’s apple. Suddenly Noli seems to become aware of her presence. He opens his eyes and jerks his chin down to look at her, then hastily reaches for his new dark glasses.

  He props himself up on one elbow. “Agh,” he says, looking round and yawning. “Agh! Hrrrrrrm! Khttt!” He turns his head until he can see the cook-queen. “Chem,” he orders briefly, then stacks up the pillows behind his head, smiles at Uncumber, and pats her hand. The cook-queen brings him a bowl of food and sullenly dumps it down next to him. He eats half of it, gobbling single-mindedly away without lifting his eyes, then puts it down on the shelf running behind the bed and rummages about among the junk up there until he finds a little box with a luridly pretty picture on the lid of olden-day aircraft in the sunset. He takes two pills out of the box and swallows them down, smiling at Uncumber.

  “Sisni,” he says. He lies down again and closes his eyes. He becomes very still. After a while his mouth falls slightly open, and a thread of saliva glistens down from one corner through the stubble on his chin. For some minutes he hums, faintly and tonelessly. A few words emerge from the depths of him, his lips scarcely moving. “Nok…. Lemnisil torvu ao koro…. Sansan….” His voice trails away. Uncumber sighs. Noli has clearly withdrawn into some crude version of that same private world which her father and brother used to inhabit so much of the time at home.

  Sadly she goes out of the house and makes her way down to the sea again. Her ankle is almost better, and her feet are becoming hardened to the roughness of the ground. The behaviour of the three queens suggests that as soon as she is completely better they will try to insist that she leave. Will Noli let them throw her out? What will happen to her then? Nothing is settled—and here’s another day wasted!

  It is oddly still and silent everywhere, she discovers when she reaches the shore. The harvesting machines are not working. There are no noises of activity from along the coast, and the streets and quays are almost deserted. She walks along them, emboldened by the quietness. Everywhere doors are locked, windows shuttered, and machines left standing. She comes across a few queens walking along as usual with bundles and baskets, and crowds of children running shouting through the silence. But she sees only two men, and one of those sinks wearily to his knees while he is still some way off, leans back against a wall, and slides slowly down until only his head is supported above the horizontal. So this is sisni, a day when the men lie at home in bed, or fall down in the streets and lie on the pavement.

  She goes back to the palace, exhausted by the nothingness of it all, and sits by a broken statue in the garden, watching the women gossiping on the marble stairs and the children playing on the terraces. She goes upstairs to the room, and at the sight of Noli still lying in bed, his lips moving soundlessly, she almost feels tempted to take one of his pills herself. But how terrible, having escaped at such cost from one sort of privacy, to shut herself into another!

  In the cool of the evening Noli rises, shaves, gets himself some food, and goes downstairs onto the terrace. A number of other kings are there already, Uncumber notices; and one by one, as it grows darker, all the kings in the palace come out. They sit on the steps, talking, gazing out into the night, and spitting. A lot of the queens are on the terrace by this time, leaning on the balustrades above the stairs with folded arms and talking to one another. Gradually, as if the idea has just occurred to them, the kings begin to turn round and beckon to their womenfolk to join them. Grimacing to show their reluctance, the queens leave their conversations and sit down next to their men. Packets of pills are passed round—for the women as well as for the men this time, and of a different sort; their effects are also familiar to Uncumber, for the night begins to fill with laughter. Here and there individual kings or queens attempt to tell stories or sing songs. But their voices quaver and trail away helplessly, defeated by the rising tide of hilarity.

  Uncumber watches it all from among the children and queens still standing around the edge of the terrace. Nobody beckons to her to join the laughers on the steps—nor, as she notices, does anyone beckon to the cook-queen or the surprised queen. For Noli is sitting with arm round the thin queen, and they are gazing into each other’s eyes and laughing with the most tender intimacy.

  Alone together at last

  But Uncumber’s turn comes.

  It is in the middle of a steamy, close afternoon. She is walking along the avenue back from the sea when she hears a voice say her name quietly next to her ear—and there is Noli, astride one of the impossible two-wheeled machines, gazing at her with his bare brown eyes. She starts and blushes in astonishment at seeing him during the working day. He takes out his dark glasses and politely puts them on, then motions to her to sit in front of him on the bar of the machine. With pleasure and apprehension she does so, and he turns and pedals back towards the waterfront with her balanced between his arms, her feet hanging over emptiness. The wind of their passage cools her forehead and blows her hair back into Noli’s face. She clings to his arms desperately and laughs and laughs all the way down the avenue.

  They weave slowly along the rutted dust roads of the town, Noli occasionally nodding at passers-by. They stop on one of the quays, and Noli points at the sea and says a great deal about it. He gestures at the harvesting machinery and explains it at some length. Uncumber understands entirely. “Yes, yes,” she says, nodding eagerly; “Ka, ka.” Then they remount, ride a little farther, and get off in front of a large windowless building with a sign outside it saying “KEL POROS pg.” It is a siston, Uncumber is interested to hear, where the kara sinfil, if she has understood aright, temnu every second ao koro vas vas with a large amount of huahuanisi lemnos lin. “Ka!” She nods. “Ka, ka, ka!” They continue their tour, and Noli shows her the great factories on shore where the sea-vegetation is processed, and the immense yards where the various products are stored before being piped out to the world. They ride for miles through these yards, up long avenues between the stacks and down interconnecting cross-streets, until Uncumber has lost all sense of direction.

  Eventually they dismount. Noli carefully leans the machine up against the side of a half-demolished stack of bales and then helps her up, climbing from bale to bale, until they find themselv
es in a kind of hollow on top. Uncumber gazes round, trembling with excitement. There is nothing to be seen but the fibrous black stuff in the bales, the lemon sky overhead—and Noli. She sits down on a bale and gazes up at him, shivering a little in spite of the closeness of the afternoon, knowing that where women are concerned he does not stand upon ceremony.

  But with her, for some reason, he does. He literally stands in front of her, explaining something to her at ceremonious length. “Yes, yes!” she says through jaws clenched to stop her teeth from rattling audibly together. She pats the bale next to her impatiently, and he sits down. But he doesn’t even put his arm round her! He keeps talking away earnestly, even ardently. “Kari los shemni vilivisti solim,” he says—or words to that effect. Uncumber feels that the time for talking is past. She presses up against him and tenderly removes his dark glasses. But he hastily snatches them back and puts them on again. Thinking that he is frightened of offending against the conventions she is used to from the inside world, she takes off her own glasses to encourage him. But this doesn’t please him either; he takes the glasses out of her hand and gently puts them back on her nose.

  It’s not that he’s unaffectionate. He runs his hand through her hair and rubs the backs of his fingers across her forehead, murmuring in a gentler voice things like, “Nem divas lori sinfil oroamini,” and “Chevon basril tenten i noro kaman.”

  But Uncumber cuts him short. “Hovi!” she commands, remembering what he, or his image, said in the round chamber in her own room at home. “Hovi! Hovi!”

  He leans forward and kisses her tenderly. But it’s not tenderness she wants. With shaking hands she starts to undo the buttons of his shirt. “Murm murmle!” he complains, his mouth trapped under hers. “Murm!” she insists. “Murmle murmle murm murmurmurm!” he cries, doing the buttons up again.

  She stops kissing him and gazes at him in consternation.

  “Ostro asboro nec nec,” he explains, rather gruffly.

  He’s shy! It’s because she’s from the inside classes! He wants to behave with what he takes to be suitable propriety! Oh, the dear, kind, baldheaded, gentle bear! But not necessary, not necessary! She puts her arms around him and her head on his shoulder and squeezes him to thank him for his thoughtfulness and to reassure him that she is happy with things the way they are. But what’s this? He’s struggling to get his hand in the back pocket of his trousers. He’s drawing out a little box with a romantic photograph on the lid of a man and woman kissing.

  He points at it. “Soli—honi,” he says, pointing first at her and then at himself. So it’s like him and her. “Yes?” she asks, impatient at this delay. He opens the box; it’s full of pills. Great heaven, he’s brought some Libidin pills for the occasion, to make himself really like an insider!

  “No!” cries Uncumber, shaking her head vigorously. “Not necessary! Not necessary at all!”

  And to make her point clearer she kneels in front of him, embraces his knees, and, crying, “Noli! Oh, Noli!” pulls his trousers down around his ankles. Snatching unsuccessfully at his trousers, he springs away from her, but, since his feet are now bound together by the trousers, falls headlong and disappears over the edge of the stack.

  “Noli!” she screams, rushing to the edge and gazing down at him. But he’s all right. He’s fallen into a heap of loose fibre and is already struggling to his feet and pulling his trousers up. The only thing is, he’s lost all the pills out of his box! He scrabbles wildly about among the unbaled fibre, trying to find one or two of them to take.

  “What are you up to?” cries Uncumber, gazing down at him. “Come back! Come back up here, darling!”

  “Noston,” he shouts over his shoulder at her.

  “Please come up, darling!”

  “Noston!”

  “Please! You can’t leave me now, like this!”

  “Sish! Noston tan!”

  Uncumber subsides on the bales, suddenly conscious that she is shouting and panting, and that her hair is hanging down over her face. What is she doing? What is happening to her? She’s not like this at all. She’s romantic, melancholy, the simple trusting dog which waits patiently to be thrown a bone! And here she is behaving like a wild animal!

  And so, by the time Noli has found a couple of his pills and eaten them and climbed back beside her, the tumult has subsided, and melancholy is undoubtedly what she is again—nervous and irritable and uncertain of herself.

  “Too late, too late,” she mutters, all her old ill-temper coming to the surface once more.

  “Sish!” says Noli, stroking her face and her neck and her breasts. “Sish!”

  “Sish to you,” says Uncumber.

  A close inspection of his pate

  And very deft and polished he is, she has to admit, very passionate and convincing and absorbed in his work. Too absorbed in his work, she feels, and not enough in her. For as the Libidin takes greater and greater effect, so he seems to retreat further and further into himself and become increasingly inaccessible.

  She feels some pain and some pleasure. But he, she supposes, watching the sweat start forth on his polished red pate just in front of her chin, is passing through rich golden-green valleys set with towered cities, to singing uplands where the southern scent of aromatic bushes drifts in the air, and on, slowly upwards, to the towers of rose-pink rock among the mountains.

  She is by no means totally insensitive to his efforts. She finds herself breathing more quickly as she studies the interesting pattern of little veins in his naked scalp, and gasping slightly. “Ah!” she says. “Ah! ah! ah!”—meaning, “I’m painfully conscious of the strands of dried fibre scratching my legs, and the edge of a bale pressing into my back, but all the same, a most sweet warmth is beginning to spread along my veins.”

  “Nec … foros liminil … gangan tor …” Noli gasps—meaning, “Slowly I am growing light upon my feet, and slowly drifting upwards through the thin, sharp air, towards that peak where all alone I shall come face to face with the rising sun.”

  For forty-seven days Noli voyages upwards, as she supposes; for three minutes she remains below. Then they settle side by side with their arms round each other, gazing up through their dark glasses into the yellowy sky.

  “No-li,” murmurs Uncumber to herself slowly, trying the syllables over on her tongue.

  “Cheshton arvonil …” murmurs Noli.

  “Un-cum-ber,” she tries next. “Do you know who the original Uncumber was? She was Saint Wilgefortis, the daughter of the King of Portugal, and with divine assistance she grew a beard, to protect her virginity from the King of Sicily.”

  “Sansan …” murmurs Noli, his lips scarcely moving.

  “But of course that was a long time ago, back in the days of sailing ships and motorcars.”

  The dancing-floor

  Almost every afternoon thereafter, if Noli is not at sea on the machines, where he works, they meet among the baled sea-grass. The encounters give Uncumber increasing pleasure; and as her pleasure grows, so does her despair. She was hoping that, as he grows more confident of her, the need to premedicate his libido will disappear. But on the contrary; the more confident he becomes, the more confidently he insists on using the apparatus of the inside classes. He pills himself up with greater skill and greater discretion, but each afternoon it is not gentle, cruel, indifferent Noli who stokes her, but a de-Nolified stoker, an anthropoid stoking machine—as deft as a surgeon, certainly, as thorough as a masseur, as passionate as a politician, but also as remote and as impersonal. He soars off to his mountaintop, she to hers. She feels that she can just make him out across the valley, by shading her eyes against the light. She doubts if he can see her at all.

  She has corrupted him, she realizes. The world which she represents still hangs about her, even though she has rejected it. It has touched against Noli’s world and bruised it, just as wealthier worlds have always bruised and destroyed the poorer ones they have come into contact with down the ages, however good the intentions of the
ir representatives.

  She trembles with eagerness, walking towards these meetings with Noli through the coppery hot afternoon. Afterwards she weeps meaninglessly, while Noli watches her with uncomprehending consternation.

  Noli continues to offer her the pills, and one afternoon, in desperation, she takes two of them, hoping that in some improbable way she may find herself travelling alongside him on the road through the golden-green valley where the blue angels trumpet over the crenellated walls of half-hidden cities. But instead she finds herself in a dark green jungle, steamy hot and full of birds whistling pure, single, flutelike notes. After many adventures she finds these birds hovering on wings that flutter too fast to see. Whistling their single thrilling notes, the birds cluster around her, closer and closer, so that first the wind of their wings—and then the wings themselves—flutters against her arms, her legs, her face, her breasts…. She is a flowered creeper, next, hanging from the trees, pouring out a sweet perfume so heavy that it sinks languishingly through the air. And against her delicate scarlet petals, all up and down her, the birds’ soft wings flutter … flutter. Pollen oozes from her flowers…. When you listen to them carefully, you realize that there is a steady rhythm in the fluttering of the birds’ wings. They’re like hearts which beat together. Thrrrm! Thrrrm! Thrrrm! But it’s not just the birds’ wings, she discovers. There are feet pounding on the beaten earth of the clearings in the jungle with the same rhythm—wildly dancing figures in strangely figured black and white masks. Thud, thud, thud, dance the violent soft feet. They are dancing on her! They are dancing her down into the rich compost of the tropical centuries, layer by layer! She is the jungle floor! The masks bend low at her as they dance, and she recognizes them! In stark, fearful black-and-white they express a row of yellow teeth with gaps, monstrous tufts of rusty hair sprouting from ears, a savagely corrugated forehead which goes up and up over the top of the head until it becomes smooth and red and shiny and marbled with tiny blue veins…. The name of the mask is—oh, she knows it!—is Nul—oh! they are dancing on her!—is Nil—oh, oh, the whole earth is shaking!—is No, Non, None, is—oh, oh, oh! the world is shaking her to pieces, and she adores it, and she is absolutely alone in the whole shaking world to enjoy it, and she hates it, she hates it!