Gut Symmetries

by Jeanette Winterson

  ‘Look for me,’ he said. ‘As you are used to do and do not be deceived by a shape you no longer recognise.’

  ‘I want to be free,’ said Mama, but Papa’s was the escape.

  · · ·

  ‘How did he die?’ Alice had asked me, when we were stacking up our life histories as a bulwark against the world. That which is shared by us. That which is not shared by you.

  ‘He bled himself to death.’

  When Papa had visited the cardiologist he had learned that his condition was rare. In most cases the failing heart thickens. The blood itself, sullen and unriverlike flows insufficiently, delaying the pumping, changing, purifying process that the body needs for its self-regulation. The heart’s remedy is to work harder. Eventually the strain will prove too great. In Papa’s case, the normal cardiac cycle of seventy-four completions per minute had doubled. His blood, thin and wild, hurtled through his body at waterfall rate. The valves of the heart and of the great vessels open and close according to the pressure within the chambers of the heart. Papa should have exploded. His heart was working too hard, but for reasons entirely contrary to the usual. Papa’s system was running at inhuman capacity. His blood pressure, the force exerted by the blood on the walls of the blood vessels that contain it, was such that we could see the blood, tidal in the arteries and veins, sweeping Papa in and out.

  The pulse is described as a wave of distension and elongation felt in an artery wall due to the contraction of the left ventricle forcing about 90 millilitres of blood into the already full aorta. When I put my fingers on Papa’s wrist to take his pulse, it felt as though someone were hammering at my hand. So violent was the pulse rate that I had to use my thumb as a gripper to prevent my fingers being thrown back at my face.

  ‘Nibelung,’ said Mama, thinking of Wagner’s dwarfs that hammer under the surface of the earth in The Ring.

  I went with Papa up to his room of the shawls and boxes and precious stones and he told me that he had been experimenting to increase his body’s revolutions. He wanted to transcend the illusion of matter. In the 1920s and 1930s, before he had fled Austria, Papa had corresponded with many of the scientists who were trying to understand, through quantum theory, what the world might really be like. He had been close to Werner Heisenberg whose strange notions of the simultaneous absence and presence of matter had stimulated Papa into investigations of his own. In the paradoxes of Kabbalah he found the paradoxes of new physics. When Heisenberg told him that every object can be understood as a point (finite, bounded, specific) and as a wave function (spreading infinitely though concentrated at different rates), Papa wanted to discover whether or not he could move himself along his own wave function, at will, whilst alive in his body. If gross matter is reducible to atoms, and the atom itself subject to unending division, then the reality of matter is conceptual. The method of Kabbalah is to free the individual from conceptual frameworks, which are all and always provisional. Could Papa escape himself by himself? Could he be his own gateway?

  And so began the years of mutterings and singing, of prayer and meditation, of jewels and dusty books, of Mama’s saucepans and conversations through the night. Where better than New York, city of invention and re-invention, the autobiography of the immigrant that re-writes itself as a fiction? The fictions that pass the thin walls of reality and assume a different kind of truth. New York, the perfect paradox. Stable and unstable, degraded and glorious. A Scheherazade of a city, full of tales told and to be told, a city of concrete and glass that lives by its dreams.

  · · ·

  The doctor had told Papa that he would soon be dead. By convention he was dead. The economy of his body had become extravagant. Too overblown to sustain life, he was, by every prediction and indicator, dead. The only objection to this analysis was Papa himself.

  As we talked, of the snow-filled winter, of my birth, of his studies, of Mama, I realised he was saying goodbye to me. I was a child, I did not know how to stop him, how to speak to him. I was as helpless as when Mama took me as a decoy to her lover’s rendezvous. The adult world still happened to me. I was not a part of it.

  Then he sent me home, away from the bookstore and back to our apartment. Mama was angry because I was late for supper and because she wanted to go out.

  Through the night I was troubled by pictures, fragments of pictures, and I seemed to be with Papa, walking on his nights of search. We were alone and the city was red.

  In the morning, when Mama went to the bookstore, she found Papa, neatly bled to death in a galvanised bathtub he kept in his room. He was pale as a plaster icon, his pounded body white with stillness. He had been reading, as his life as we knew it drained away. Mama picked up the book. It was a new collection from a poet he admired: Muriel Rukeyser, Body of Waking (1958). She looked at the page.

  KING’S MOUNTAIN

  In all the cities of this year

  I have longed for the other city.

  In all the rooms of this year

  I have entered one red room.

  In all the futures I have walked toward

  I have seen a future I can hardly name.

  But here the road we drive

  Turns upon another country.

  I have seen white beginnings,

  A slow sea without glaze or speed,

  Movement of land, a long lying-down dance.

  This is fog-country. Milk. Country of time.

  I see your tormented color, the steep front of your storm

  Break dissipated among limitless profiles.

  I see the shapes of waves in the cross-sea

  Advance, a fog-surface over the fog-floor.

  Seamounts, slow-flowing. Color. Plunge-point of air.

  In all the meanings of this year

  There will be the ferny meaning.

  It rises leaning and green, streams through star-lattices;

  After the last cliff, wave-eroded silver,

  Forgets the limitations of our love,

  These drifts and caves dissolve and pillars of these countries

  Long-crested dissolve to the future, a new form.

  And Mama cried then, hard and sad, her back up against the blood-heavy bath, Papa’s hand in hers. This was he, her dark, fire-burned man, and she had loved him, she remembered she had, and the love strong as its memory was in her veins and in his. A part of them that life had separated returned in death. The tormented colour had cleared and the limitations of their love. She remembered she had loved him and that part of herself was redeemed.

  Jove and I lay on the deck boards listening to the close of the opera. Don Giovanni, unrepentant, dragged down into Hell. Do we admire him or do we despise him? Liar, cheat, murderer, seducer. As far as I know, Jove has never killed anyone. Then …

  ME: Jove, Alice is alive, isn’t she?

  HE: As alive as you and I and with better odds.

  ME: You didn’t kill her, did you?

  HE: Why would I kill Alice?

  ME: To punish her. To punish me. To punish yourself.

  HE: I don’t believe in punishment.

  ME: Of course you do. You are a Catholic.

  HE: Lapsed.

  ME: I noticed you had a sudden attack of faith last night.

  HE: I wanted to die clean.

  ME: The letter was your confession?

  HE: My only confession.

  ME: And all those other women?

  HE: Why do you think I do it?

  ME: Because you are compulsive, neurotic, infantile, selfish.

  HE: Because I am alone.

  ME: You are married to me.

  He rolled over and sat up. He looked old, defeated.

  HE: I want to go on being married to you.

  ME: It’s too late.

  HE: Is it? If we can’t live together at least we can die together.

  ME: Was that the plan?

  HE: No. No. A joke.

  ME: My husband the graveside humorist.

  He reached for the head-cans and start
ed to work on the radio again. I went below deck to clear up the mess and to see how much food we had left. The engine and rudder had been damaged during the storm, and although we had a sail, neither of us knew how to unfurl it let alone direct it to the wind. We were drifting, sea-blasted, and our only hope was rescue. We had enough food for about four days and enough water for a week if we stopped washing. And then? I turned my mind away from then.

  I got out some paper and began to write to Alice. I had the curious sensation that if I was not addressing a corpse a corpse was addressing Alice. Which of us was alive?

  ‘My dear Alice, I do not know if or when you will receive this letter …’ Up and above I could hear Jove cursing the indifferent circuit board. If we were officially dead, did it matter that we considered ourselves alive? To whom could we protest about this sudden re-definition? When would we come to accept it? Jove and Stella. Death by fiat.

  ‘Will you understand? I am not sure that I understand it myself. Give me your hand. Put it to my mouth. Kiss you. Tongue, teeth, language. My words forming in bubbles under your fingers. Water and air. Hope. I want to tell you … and so I go diving for the words, bringing them back in glittering nets, spilled over our feet as we stand amazed at the sea. I want to tell you how … and so these are words speared for you, tasted for you, fed one by one. Words kept salted when they cannot be found fresh. Words kept fresh when they cannot be found clean. The words go deeper, far out of reach of vessels, blood vessels bursting, that thick humming in the head. To find the words, just out of reach, beyond my hand, the coral of it, pearl of it, fish.

  ‘Am I a pearl fisher? To crack out of the dumb the eloquent? Take this, dissolve it in wine, drink it and speak to me. Does it loosen your tongue? What marvellous things we would say if we could. What of the stories still to be told? There are Arabian Nights in your eyes. If we are in the desert, then speak the wadi. If we are in the earthquake then speak the rock. Put your hand to my mouth. Kiss me. Tongue, teeth, words. Bucket up the words and wash in them. If we are in the water speak salt tears.

  ‘I want to tell you how much … the expanse of us, unhindered, stretch of sea-bird wings at starboard. Stars in your eyes, the infinity of you, the galaxy of my girl that I explore. The much of you was more than I dared hope for. Treasure is the stuff of legends. Gold in the mine of you. Mine own gold. I thought you were a jewelled bird of the kind Byzantine emperors kept. Rare, fabulous, told of but unseen. What words for a plumage like yours? The surprise of wings was this love. We did escape gravity. If I flew too close to the sun, forgive me. Water claims her own at last. You were the one who understood the theory of flight. You were the one who taught me the aerodynamics of risk. I should have trusted you. The failure was mine, Alice, not the pain of having spoken and said nothing. Not the pain of words that splinter in the throat. Call every speck of me by right. Letter me. I say your name as a spell and leave my last word here as yours. I want to tell you how much I love you. You.’

  I sealed it in an empty fuel canister and put it with my clothes. I wrote her name in charcoal on the tin side. There was nothing more I could do. Dry-hearted I began to cook spaghetti. Food tastes better in …

  When Jove and I were early married we lived over the trattoria and our love-making was rhythmed to the regular whoosh and grind of the espresso machine and the thin whirr of the blade for the parma ham. Our bed was a board balanced on six huge drums of olive oil, the spaces between infilled with cartons of Signora Rossetti’s pasta ready for sale. Sometimes, she or one of the boys used to come hurrying up the slanted stairs shouting ‘Pasta pronto’, and it did not matter whether we were asleep or awake, in bed or out of it, the tagliatelle and the linguine had to be hauled from under our trembling mattress and dropped down the fire chute to the truck waiting below.

  At least I never had to cook. Meals were taken with the rest of the extended family, eighteen of them plus two priests, all round a long table at the back of the diner. Jove had no money at all. He was without a job and his savings had gone to his divorced wife and child. I supported us by teaching German to businessmen and English literature to students who hardly knew which way up to hold a book. In the evening we both worked in the trattoria. Signora Rossetti had furious rows with her difficult son because he would use the kitchen blackboard to try out his equations. The cook, looking for the menu numbers that had been ordered, found them mixed with a set of figures that seemed to be asking her to serve sardines on top of a fried egg sauced with strawberry milkshake.

  At last, Papa’s dusty old attorney managed to complete the formalities of my coming-of-age bequest, and while it was not riches, it was enough to set us up in our own apartment and to free us from our chains of spaghetti.

  Jove got a university job. I had time for my poetry. We were happy. I did not realise that even then he was visiting someone else. Later, he said it was because I was out all day working. Later, Signora Rossetti said to me that she was glad to be the mother of her son and not his wife. ‘He’ll change,’ I said.

  · · ·

  When the storm hit the boat off horizontal, and I was temporarily knocked out by a falling tilly lamp, I regained consciousness in the expectation of death. The boat would hole any minute and I would be drowned. Strangely I felt calm. There was no possibility of control or sacrifice or heroics. I was a child again at the mercy of larger forces. I clung to my bunk as Jove clung to the stove and let myself float on the wash of memories and recognitions that took the place of thinking. I did not speak to him, or hear him, although he was talking constantly, until he said Alice’s name. Then I was back in my body, outside of death, hating him and wanting to live so that I could punish him for what he had done.

  After many hours the storm split into two and roared off to the west and to the east, leaving us in its gap, flat and balanced again. My arms were rigid with pain. When I tried to let go of the bunk bolts I could not ungrip my fingers. Jove had to prise them open and sit me up, my arms still stretched out in front of me like a sleepwalker.

  As we accustomed ourselves to this reprieve, knew ourselves again as warm and solid and breathing, we heard the bulletin on the radio. It seemed that days had passed, not dead, not alive, in the cat’s paw of the storm. The irony of our livingness was that we were officially dead.

  ‘Not quite,’ said Jove. ‘ “Presumed” has plenty of go in it yet. They’ll send the choppers over when the clouds lift.’

  ‘Nor dim nor red, like God’s own head,

  The glorious Sun uprist.’

  I had learned Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner off by heart when Mama and I took the ship back to Hamburg. I had thought it was Papa following us like the albatross, the friendly bird of good omen, shot by the callous mariner. I had blamed Mama for his death. Only later could I understand a little more of their difficult love. On board ship I used to wander the deck looking for Papa as he had told me to do.

  The clouds lifted. The sun came up, bright, rinsed. Today or the next day we would be rescued.

  Rescue me. I leaned against the mocking mast furled tight as a banker’s umbrella. The human condition seems to be one of waiting to be rescued. Will it be you? Will it be today? Will the world open in splendent colour, spirit-blue, that aniline blue, ripe indigo or the tone of an unclouded sky? Say it will. Each other’s greatest fear. Each other’s only hope. I put out my hand and withdraw it at the same time. What are my chances of choosing well? We court each other in elaborate masks and ballgowns. I clothe myself in conversation, money, wit. Whatever will win you, I become. I disguise myself as your rescuer so that you will be mine.

  Self-sufficient? Or so the story goes, but two can row faster than one and I wanted to get away. So did you. Jove, Alice. Insert the name you please. Always the getaway. A new start. Rescued from the smallness that we are. My incondite life.

  Perhaps Jove faces the truth better than I do: that there is no rescue. Will be none. That there are only boat rides out to sea followed by inevitable return or shipwreck
. He says he is alone. He does not believe that he will be saved. He plays the game like a compulsive gambler but he does not expect to win. He says his lies are the only possible honesty. I could respect that if he had not married me.

  ‘I had to try,’ he said. ‘I want to try now.’

  I can tell by his desperation that in spite of his bravado he does not think that anyone will come for us. My stillness repels and fascinates him. He spends all his time fiddling with the radio or fishing or trying to rig up a make-shift rudder. Then he flops down and asks for coffee and I am serving smaller and smaller cups.

  ‘It’s my head,’ I said to him, by way of explanation. When I was hit by the falling lamp I think it damaged my incudes (the bones of the middle ear). I lose my balance easily and I can hear voices. He is afraid that I am mad but I am not mad. I have been hurt and he is the hurter. I have been damaged and he has damaged me. It is easier for him to worry that I am mad.

  Blame? No I don’t blame him. I came here of my own free will. All the years of deceit have been of my own free will. Whatever that is.

  Evening and the sky darkens to lead-blue. Morning and it begins the blue colour of skim-milk. The tough membrane that shields me from too much awareness has begun to dissolve. It is necessary to go through life a little blunted, a little cloaked, how else to bear even a single day? The horror and the glory would overwhelm me. Papa used to talk about the story of the burning bush when God appears to Moses as a roar of fire. Moses asks to see God face to face and God tells him that to do so, even partially, even for a second, would kill him with its beauty and its power. ‘Who shall look on God and live?’ To Papa this was the central paradox of his religion, for there is no life without God and yet to approach God means death. What Papa wanted was to widen the gateways of perception. To see as much as it was possible to see while inside the limitations of consciousness. Like all mystics he used fasting and bodily deprivation to spread out his mind while disciplining his mortal self. Some would say that his visions and his ecstasies were nothing more than physiological morbidity. I do not know, but I know that occasionally I too could look through the cleanness of him and see the kick of joy in the universe. I see something of that now, my barriers down, my defences broken. I would be afraid if I were trying to save myself but saving myself is a thing of the past. If these are my last days then I would rather see the horror and the glory as it is.