Gut Symmetries

by Jeanette Winterson

  Walk with me. Walk time in its skeleton. Walk the white curve of Adam’s rib. White, that absorbs the minimum, reflects the maximum of light rays, ecstasy of light at the dead of the year.

  Walk with me. Walk the ancient history of his body, recorded in quasars, erupted in light. Kiss him and I kiss the full of him and the dust of him. Touch him where he is firm and my hand passes through into empty space. Love him and I love this man, this body. Love him and I love star-dust and light.

  · · ·

  Walk with me. Walk the 6,000,000,000,000 miles of travelled light, single year’s journey of illumination, ship miles under the glowing keel. In the long frost the sky brightens and the rim of the earth is pierced by sharp stars. After the leaf-fall the star-fall, the winter shedding of too much light. Walk the seen and unseen. What can be rendered visible and what cannot.

  The wind up at dusk and the leaves in squalls and the birds flying into the wind-backed leaves so that in the lost light I could not say where the leaves stopped and the birds began. I try to distinguish but at crucial moments the space between carefully separated objects collapses and I too am whirled up against my will into the dervish of matter. The difficulty is that every firm step I win out of chaos is a firm step towards … more chaos. I throw a rope bridge, haul myself across the gap, and huddled on a little outcrop, safe for now, observe the view. What is the view? Another gap, another stretch of water.

  The wind at dusk. We were to be the lightest of things, he and I, lifting each other up above the heaviness of life. It was because we knew that gravity is always part of the equation that we tried to defeat it. Lighter than light in the atmosphere of our love.

  It was a volatile experiment, soon snared by the ordinariness we set out to resist. Our alchemical transformations, like those of the alchemists before us, became more and more weighed down by the baseness of normal life. Lies, secrets, silences, common currency of deceit.

  Say alchemy to most people and they will say, ‘Turn metal into gold.’ Yet what Paracelsus and the alchemists wanted was to make themselves the living gold. The treasure without moth or rust, spirit (pneuma) unalloyed.

  Say theoretical physics to most people five hundred years from now and perhaps they will say, ‘Bombs and destruction.’ How to explain that what we saw, briefly, dimly, was a new heaven and a new earth?

  Is crassness bound to win? To live differently, to love differently, to think differently, or to try to. Is the danger of beauty so great that it is better to live without it (The Standard Model)? Or to fall into her arms fire to fire? There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value. Inside the horror of Nagasaki and Hiroshima lies the beauty of Einstein’s E = MC2.

  A man slow of speech and gentle of person. What patterns do the numbers make, breaking and beginning in the waters of his spirit?

  And you? Now that I have discovered you? Beautiful, dangerous, unleashed. Still I try to hold you, knowing that your body is faced with knives.

  When Jove began to notice me I was puppy-dog glad. Like dogs everywhere I was assured that my man was the best man and love is enough.

  ‘Come out for a walk?’

  Woof.

  ‘Like some dinner?’

  Woof.

  ‘Sit on my knee.’

  Woof.

  I resisted him as all abandoned strays do a new home; for at least two days. Even while I was mouthing ‘no’ my heart was yapping ‘yes’.

  It had been the same with my father. His interest in me pendulumed from hot intensity to cool indifference. Weeks together would be followed by months apart. Then he would woo me again and each time I was determined to resist. He knew that. He waited. So did Jove.

  I thought he made me fully human. I did not think of us as one man and his dog.

  When Jove clipped me to him he widened his view. With a dog you can go places you cannot go alone. At his side I was access and envy (What a showpiece. Where did you find her?). At my side he was young and sexy (Will you marry him?). He told me he and his wife were getting a divorce. If I had turned into a dog he had always been a dark horse.

  When I asked him for explanations he said, ‘I need time.’

  Time.

  Newton visualised time as an arrow flying towards its target. Einstein understood time as a river, moving forward, forceful, directed, but also bowed, curved, sometimes subterranean, not ending but pouring itself into a greater sea. A river cannot flow against its current, but it can flow in circles; its eddies and whirlpools regularly break up its strong press forward. The riverrun is maverick, there is a high chance of cross-current, a snag of time that returns us without warning to a place we thought we had sailed through long since.

  Anyone to whom this happens clings faithfully to the clock; the hour will pass, we will certainly move on. Then we find the clock is neither raft nor lifebelt. The horological illusion of progress sinks. The past comes with us, like a drag-net of fishes. We tow it down river, people and things, emotions, time’s inhabitants, not left on shore way back, but still swimming close by.

  A kick in the current twists us round, and suddenly we are caught in the net we made, the accumulations of a lifetime just under the surface. What were those stories about townships at the bottom of a river? Lost kingdoms tantalisingly visible when the water was calm? It is well-known that mermaids flash through the dark sea to swim like salmon against the river.

  The unconscious, it seems, will not let go of its hoard. The past comes with us and occasionally kidnaps the present, so that the distinctions we depend on for safety, for sanity, disappear. Past. Present. Future. When this happens we are no longer sure who we are, or perhaps we can no longer pretend to be sure who we are.

  If time is a river then we shall all meet death by water.

  MISSING PRESUMED DEAD

  A yacht sailing off Capri was last sighted on Sunday June 16 at 18:00 hours. The boat was in difficulties. Severe storms prevented rescue attempts for 24 hours. It is thought that the boat could be drifting at sea.

  We had planned a sailing holiday together, Jove and I. Three weeks of salty confinement on the flashing seas. I wanted to be shut away with him, the certainty of him and me in our precarious world, the world itself, nothing but a navigable sea.

  On a boat there is no escape. I wanted no escape. I had been annexed by Jove. What had begun as a comity of sovereign states had ended in invasion. He had invaded me but who was arguing over the boundaries? I hardly cared that sharing had come to be spelled capture. Intellectually I was emancipated. Emotionally I still lived in a seraglio. I had been waiting for my prince to come.

  I had found relief with Jove and did not question it. Relief from the burden of myself. Here was a recognised pattern with room in it for my piece. My gaps and angles now fitted somewhere. I was joined up, part of a whole not awkward, standing out. The cloak of invisibility conferred by coupledom meant that I was no longer Alice but Alice and Jove. There were two of us to reckon with. Two names on the invitation.

  And then there were three.

  His wife, his mistress, met.

  Page of Cups

  I met Stella at the Algonquin Hotel. The Algonquin Hotel; Dorothy Parker, James Thurber, The New Yorker, my father in 1957. He had stayed there because it seemed so English and when he brought me to New York for the first time as a child our reservations were at the Algonquin Hotel.

  He had booked his old room and even packed a tie he used to wear in those days. Red silk with little white polka dots, he never would say who had given it to him.

  ‘Never tell all thy love.’

  Like my grandmother he kept secrets the way other people keep fish. They were a hobby, a fascination, his underwater collection of the rare and the strange. Occasionally something would float up to the surface, unexpected, unexplained.

  Mother said: ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

  Father said: ‘There was nothing to tell.’

  I am my father’s daughter.

 
She and I would be approaching the place from opposite ends of town. I imagined her, angry, confident, ready to match me and beat me at my own game. This was the big fight and Jove the prize. When I told him she had written to me he had decided to visit friends for the weekend.

  I had her letter in my pocket. The careful handwriting. The instruction to obey. ‘I will meet you on Wednesday the 12th at 6:30 p.m. in the bar at the Algonquin Hotel.’

  Why had she chosen here?

  Here it was.

  Five minutes to spare. The cruelty of time.

  I had dressed as a warrior: black from cleavage to insoles, hair down, fat hoops of gold in my ears, war-paint make-up. I had a twenty-year advantage over my opponent and I intended to use every month of it.

  She would be greying, she would be lined, she would be overweight, she would be clothes-careless. She would be poetically besocked and sandalled, her eyes behind glass, like museum exhibits. I could see her, hair and flesh escaping, hope trapped inside. I would drain her to the sump.

  No sign of her. The bar was a chessboard of couples manoeuvring Martinis, and waiters high-carrying chrome trays. I moved in black knight right angles across and cross the lines but apart from a few appreciative businessmen there was no one who seemed interested in me.

  Of course she had not come. Of course she would not come. It had been a nerve war and I had won. I noticed I had a terrible pain in my neck. I ordered a drink and collapsed under a potted palm.

  ‘May I sit here?’

  ‘Please do. You must be English.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Too polite to be an American.’

  ‘Aren’t Americans polite?’

  ‘Only if you pay them enough.’

  ‘The British aren’t polite no matter how much you pay them.’

  ‘Then you and I must be refugees.’

  ‘I suppose I am. My father used to come here. He loved New York. He said it was the only place in the world where a man could be himself while working his shirt off to become somebody else.’

  ‘And did he?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Become somebody else.’

  ‘Yes. Yes he did.’

  We were quiet. She was looking towards the door. I looked at her. She was slim, wired, a greyhound body, half bent forward now, shape of her back muscles contouring her shirt, white, starched, expensive. Her left arm looked like the front window of Tiffany’s. I was not sure how a woman could wear so much silver and sit without a lean.

  Her hair was dark red, dogwood red, leather red with a suppleness to it that is part gift, part effort. I guessed that the look of hers was as artful as it was artless.

  ‘Are you waiting for someone?’ I said.

  ‘I was.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Are you staying here?’

  ‘No. I live in New York. I work at the Institute for Advanced Studies. I came here to meet …’

  To meet: to come face to face with. To become acquainted with. To be introduced. To find. To experience. To receive. To await the arrival of. To encounter. To encounter in conflict.

  ‘I came here to meet …’

  · · ·

  There was a wind in the room that tore the drink out of the drinkers, that scattered the bar bottles like bottle tops, that levitated the furniture and smashed it into the tranced wall. Waiters and waited on blew in rags out of the door. There was nothing left in the room but she and me, she and me hypnotised by each other, unable to speak because of the wind.

  She gathered her things and together we left the destroyed room. I had to follow her as she twisted the pavements under her feet. I lost sense of where we were. The grid had buckled. The city was a bent alley and she was the better rat.

  At last we arrived at a small diner in a beaten-up part of town. She swung inside and we sat at a menacingly nice checked-cloth table with two carnations and a few rods of grissini. A boy came out with a carafe of red wine and a bowl of olives. He handed us the menus as if this was just an ordinary dinner in an ordinary day. I had fallen into the hands of the Borgias and now they wanted me to eat.

  I looked at the menu. FOOD TASTES BETTER IN ITALIAN.

  ‘This is where I met him,’ she said. ‘In 1947 on the day that I was born …’

  The little boy had been asleep and through his dreams came a sleigh piled with furs and followed on foot by a band of wild dark men, huddled hurrying, talking in a language he did not understand. He heard barking and crying and from below the protesting water being drawn along the frozen pipes and into the geyser. He woke up and ran downstairs. The chairs and tables had been pushed back against the walls and the double doors onto the street were open. Through the blue curtain of cold, into the orange lights, six wolves drew a sledge. The leading pair pulled up two inches from his chest and level with it. One of the wolves licked his face with its brown-pink parma ham tongue. Now he would be eaten.

  ‘Mama! Mama! Mama! Il lupo mi mangierá!’

  ‘Eccolo, Romulo,’ said Signora Rossetti, and the little boy was hoisted over the grinning dogs and told how Romulus and Remus, the abandoned twins, had been suckled by a she-wolf and thus saved to found the great city of Rome.

  Not wishing to be outdone, the Elders all began to tell stories at once of Hebrew heroes and animal help: Abraham’s ram, Balaam’s ass, Jacob’s lion, Samson’s bees. Job’s entire menagerie, including the horse that danced and crieth among the trumpets ‘Aha!’

  ‘And our Saviour himself,’ said Signora Rossetti, whose contribution was met with a generally icy stare colder than the air outside.

  But this was no night to pick quarrels and over polenta and kirsch it was agreed that Jesus could be included because he was Jewish and because he had been assisted at birth by donkeys, sheep and dogs.

  The little boy had never seen a baby pink as a wolf’s tongue.

  As she told the story she forgot about me. I had begun as an adversary, become an audience, and now seemed only a foot-light. The stage was hers and if she was performing for anyone it was herself.

  A very good performer she was; breaking into Yiddish, into Italian, into German, accenting and gesturing, turning now into a claque of elderly Jews, now into a frightened small boy. I had to let go of my detachment, my resentment. When she imitated the horse that crieth among the trumpets ‘Aha!’, I was back with Grandmother again, back with the weekly visits and the preposterous slippers, the huge full-length apron, its pocket stuffed with Polo mints and a battered Bible.

  Perhaps it was the seriousness of our business that pushed us both into laughter, extremes of emotion so easily tumbling into their opposites. Yet there was relief for us to find a human face behind the monster mask; the monster wife, the monster mistress, and what about the monster man?

  ‘He was a flirt even then,’ said Stella. ‘He flirted with Mama who had a weakness for dark hair and dark eyes, even in a seven-year-old boy.’

  ‘But Jove is younger than you.’

  ‘Did he tell you that?’

  ‘You were born in 1940. He was born in 1947.’

  ‘The other way round.’

  And she told me how she and her mother had visited the diner once a week, on a Saturday, for the next eleven years. It had to be Saturday. The Jewish Shabbat. Papa’s ecstasy. Mama’s defiance. Her daughter was not Jewish. Jewishness is continued through the female line. Mama would not have her daughter given up to Papa’s passion.

  Mother and daughter, secular, apart. Papa beckoning the child in unwatched moments, taking her into his secret room, showing her symbols and precious stones. She had navigated her parents’ hostile waters with a child’s discretion, learning to keep from one the confessions of the other. Learning to hide love.

  When she was eleven, Papa died. Within three months Mother in a little black suit, child in a black warm coat, took ship to Hamburg and re-settled in Berlin. The books and the bookshop had been sold and the secret room was empty.

  While she was talking I wondered why Jove wanted me. I had come out
dressed to kill and I was the one being murdered. My self-esteem is a jigsaw I cannot complete. I get one part of the picture and the rest lies in pieces. I suspect that there is no picture, only fragments. Other people seem to glue it together somehow and not to worry that they have been using pieces from several different boxes. So what is the answer? Is identity a deceit, a make-shift, and should we hurry to make any pattern we can? Or is there a coherence, perhaps a beauty, if it were possible to find it? I would like to convince myself about myself but I cannot. The best there is are days when the jigsaw assumes its own meaning and I no longer care what picture is emerging. By that I mean I am unfrightened by the unexpected. If there is beauty it will surprise me. Of all things it cannot be calculated. I said I suspect that there is no picture. I should have said that whatever the picture is, it will not be the one on the box.

  ME: I am sorry

  SHE: This isn’t the first time.

  ME: I know that.

  SHE: They always do.

  ME: I thought I might be the one.

  SHE: They always do.

  ME: You could leave him.

  SHE: To you?

  ME: To himself.

  SHE: Simple in books.

  ME: Not in your books.

  SHE: Words, words, he says.

  ME: Safety in numbers.

  SHE: Even the hairs of your head are numbered …

  ME: What number am I?

  SHE: Five.

  ME: That’s lucky.

  SHE: Said to ward off the Evil Eye.

  ME: I thought that was you.

  SHE: Little round glasses?

  ME: Socks and sandals.

  SHE: Fat, beery.

  ME: Out of touch.

  SHE: Give me your hand.

  ME: What?

  SHE: I’ll read it for you.

  ME: What do you see?

  SHE: Beauty and fear.

  ME: You aren’t looking.