Dear Thief: A Novel

by Samantha Harvey

  Maybe the bull has a moment of love then. You might laugh, but if all you ever do is live unthreatened in the bubble of your absolute autonomy, eating, shitting, inseminating, replicating yourself over and over, what can you really love? Now it has the man at eye level and it understands the invitation. The cape communicates between them, beckoning, repelling, this way, that way, charge, hold back. The band plays. We shouldn’t think the bull is just meat thrown into a ring, it is an intelligence and it wants something it sees, it wants to be reckoned with. And the matador—we shouldn’t be fooled by his gold silk, he is an animal and he wants to be reckoned with. You see that for a moment—only a moment—the bull recognises himself in the man, and the man in the bull.

  Why can’t this moment go on longer between them? As in the tango, which never resolves. When the bull finally realises that the man is cruel, there is no longer recognition. The bull is not cruel, why does the man have to be; why must it end like this? The matador draws his sword and pushes it down through the shoulders into the bull’s heart, or lungs, or whatever meets the sword first. The bull’s eyes become humid. In two fights the kill is clean, in the other four a second sword has to be used to cut through the spine. The result is the same: one way or another the bull staggers and drops like a rock into its short shadow, and is dragged away to music.

  The heat is flattening and Teddy has slept through the whole thing, with his head on Nicolas’ lap. Your thumbs twitch in rage but you have become otherwise still and quiet. Nicolas has been watching you out of the corner of his eye. I have been wondering why a sword had to be drawn; slaughter is so unintelligent, so colourless, it forces us to think the least interesting thoughts. It makes us think that the strong one wins and the weak one loses. It makes us think the winner does not limp.

  You look pleased with yourself. Have you been out stealing hens?

  You have that blush you get when winning at cards, which in this case might be to do with remembering Spain; you mentioned that holiday for a long time after—the villa we stayed in with the big, cool, marble-floored living room and virtually nothing in it, save for five cheap armchairs and a vast table that converted into a platform for table tennis when the net was clipped on.

  You liked the villa, didn’t you—the villa and its garden. Cool and uneventful inside, hot and busy out, with its wild grasses rubbing drily together and its geckos darting and cicadas creaking in the juniper tree and its—as you put it—slatternly flowers. You enjoyed our daily struggle of sun versus parasol as we tried to construct movable shade on the beach. We made a circle of shade and it became an ellipse and then a sliver. We made another and another the entire day long and the sun hovered and swooped in on each one. I think this thankless task appealed to you, probably even amused you—when Nicolas, Teddy and I went in the sea, you stayed onshore to crawl about spearing the two parasols into the sand, draping towels or T-shirts across the gap. Then you would sit in the sun and let yourself burn. In the dried-up riverbeds of the Tabernas Desert you found a sprawling oleander and what you thought was an edible prickly pear, which you tried to pick, before our guide bent and stopped your hand. Squinting up at the gallows in the main street at Fort Bravo film studios, you held your blouse away from your body, red-faced, hair wet with sweat, and grinned at a crack of gunshot as though you were the happiest you had been.

  Yes, I’d say Spain has flushed you. On the screen your geese are sheeting, gliding out of frame. Sliding, gliding, slipping through a narrow gap in existence towards freedom and something more real than all this table-hut-bed-forest-city-man-woman debacle we call reality. But suddenly, because I brought it up, you are thinking of Spain, and every time you think of Spain it brings to mind that bit in the Aitareya Upanishad, that bit about the bull. What is it? God pulls a bull out of the water, then a horse, then a man. There is God, going about creation messily, engaged in the hot, dark, slick, wet process by which life is dredged from the depths. You like this bit—God the diver and delver, slumping his finds onto the bank and giving them life with his breath.

  You left before the end of the bullfight and sat outside the plaza in the street, chain-smoking some little pencil-thin cigarillos. By the time we found you there was a handful of spent ends piled up by your toes. ‘How could you watch it?’ you said. ‘It was like watching Henry VIII slaying his wives. You two would have been the kind of people who went to public hangings.’

  We thought then that you would be unbearable for the rest of the evening; Nicolas looked glad it was the last day. Forgive us for thinking that everything you had enjoyed about Spain had been undone in one afternoon in a bullring—we were wrong. You said something that evening as we were walking back through Almería in the dusk that I have maybe only recently interpreted fully. Teddy commented that there was no grass, or no green bumps, as he called it—hills, pasture, meadow. He was right, it was just coastal plain, mountain or desert canyon. And when, at the thought of English greenness, Nicolas began humming ‘Jerusalem’, you said something like, ‘The Jesus who walked upon England’s mountains green was a fop, that is the truth, a fop who got lynched.’

  I remember it, because it was only half an hour or so after leaving the plaza, and if ever the green pleasantness of England was going to come into your favour it should have been then, in your recoil from the bullfight. But instead you opened up from your tall stoop and walked so as to maximise the evening air on your chest, and back at the villa you cut yourself a fringe with kitchen scissors so that your face was an open window and Spain could come flooding in, like fresh air into a sickroom. It was the emboldening a person gets when they see another behave more despicably than themselves; it was a final sealing of a friendship that you and Spain had been developing all week.

  I have thought about this since. England has always seemed to you sort of jolly, neat, falsely gay. Unable to contend with the prospect of a God who gets his hands dirty. But Spain was another matter; from the moment you set foot in Spain you felt it was the kind of place that could worship a God who got down with the slick and seminal things. Maybe an irrational thought, but even so. Something about the way the land itself had seemed to sink through the hot air like a layer of sediment, and felt dense and warm to walk on, whereas in England the fields and hills sit pertly, like some nervous pre-pubescent girl.

  Almería had scorched afternoons and clammy dark evenings, oversized insects and locals with oily overcooked skin, steep orange desert canyons, red dust that stuck to sweat, warm, slow-moving tides pulled by distended moons towards the unknownness of Africa, viscous bull blood, a lump of unfamiliar animal on a dinner plate. This overgrowth, this slight impure libidinous danger—it always makes you draw a connection with that hot messy passage in the Upanishads where God opened the suture of the skull and entered the first human. We are egg-born, it says: egg-born, womb-born, sweat-born, soil-born. God is passed on in the exchange of seed. England turns its head politely, either too pragmatic for God, or too squeamish for this God. But in Spain, where people were so much freer with their flesh, touched more, laughed more, were irrational and passionate and callous and more easily angered; in Spain you would not be laughed at if you tried to get to heaven by going downwards rather than upwards, if you tried to get there by passing through another’s flesh.

  This is what it says in the Aitareya Upanishad: a man is inside himself in the form of a seed. It is only when he ejects that seed into a woman that he is born. But he must be born again and again before he can break out of the body and be free. Your road to freedom passes through the bodies of others; it does not involve some levitation of your spirit or the quelling of the things that stir in your loins. God put that stirring in your loins so you could be born into another, and thus start your journey to immortality.

  So now, flushed, I see you. You are thinking back to the Plaza de Toros, and even now you can feel the sweat between your thighs and see the crowd tossing cushions into the air, which is beginning to feel like boiled milk. In the noisy heat of t
he bullring you need something; not a cigarette, it is too hot for smoking, maybe a shot of something dissolved in water. Needle better, but no needles on this holiday. It is not that you need a lift, but that you feel lifted and want to celebrate it. You cannot even say why you feel this way in this heat, which is insufferable, at this bullfight, which is disgusting—but something has risen in you that feels like religious feeling, or divine licence, which is close to rage and hate and love all at once.

  Something of that mood was with you from the moment you set foot on Spanish tarmac, heightening at the sight of the desert badlands and in the markets of La Chanca and in the orange spears of the bird of paradise that grew in the garden. And oh, I know, I know—you will be finding my memory of it all a little too stagey and false. The blood and the heat and the flora and the sex; the lust in the dust. True enough, Spain has become a filmset to me, the whole of it barely more real than Fort Bravo itself. It has become a piece of strange theatre in the otherwise prosaic run of my life, and maybe this is the only way I can understand it. But all the same there are the facts, whereby on the last night, after the bullfight, with the moon hanging between the villa and the sea, you, feeling irrepressible, lay naked on the grass when you thought everyone else was in bed, and might have been surprised—though maybe not all that surprised—when Nicolas came to you.

  Do you not think I know how many times you have wished this letter had not arrived, since all it does is remind you of things you are no longer interested in. You think I don’t know how uninterested you are, but I know. You are not interested in the recriminations that so tediously follow what you and Nicolas did that night; it is like recriminating a woman for slingshotting a dove, without acknowledging that she did so to feed her starving child. Sometimes the ends justify the means, and you are tired with this banal preoccupation with the means only. But the very mention of Spain from a third party, from a source outside your own mind, is one of the more interesting turns the letter has taken. You read the section from the Upanishads again and your heart swells. Sage Wāmadewa, broke out of the body, did all that he desired, attained the Kingdom of Heaven, became immortal; yes, became immortal.

  Suddenly the geese on the screen look no more substantial or significant than puddles that have evaporated. It is their sound you now notice, that rough feverish call to adventure, calling you back to the realm of things that exert themselves with living. If you are ashamed at all of what you did, it is because you now know better; Nicolas, or any other man or woman or living or non-living thing, was never going to save you. But you are not ashamed of adultery, which is, as the name suggests, adults being as such. So when I got out of bed and came out to the garden to see where Nicolas had gone, and saw you no more than fifteen feet away, astride him on the grass facing the villa, you did not freeze with guilt, but looked at me and shook your head, left, then right: a firm, complicit no.

  One of your hands was resting on his chest, trying to feel for the banging, longing muscle of heart inside. Spain has shown you a tunnel out of yourself, into the world of action. As Nicolas joins you in the tunnel you think of that very passage in the Upanishads that starts with God dredging a bull from the depths and culminates in Sage Wāmadewa’s immortality. And now sex feels like a religious act; the whole holiday feels like a religious act, and England and marriages and pastures and cool summers are a blasphemy.

  Sage Wāmadewa did all that he desired; why not you? More fool those who do not. Life is short. Life shoots you a lethal dose of time. Time is a drug that wears off. You seem to stare at me from under that crooked fringe as if to say, You brought this up. Or worse, as if to say: Put your pen down, my friend, forget it; I will never be sorry. I was trying to save myself; I failed, but at least I had the dignity to want to be saved. More fool you, if you don’t want to save yourself too.

  But really, is that what you call saving yourself?

  When I last saw you, you did not look like a person who was saving herself. I always see that platform empty of trains, and you at the far end. When I see this I have to wonder if you are even alive, and I tell myself you must be, simply because death has a strangely efficient grapevine and we would have heard if you weren’t; this is my only consolation, and maybe an empty one at that. You left us in the winter with a little bit of Spanish tan still on your arms, and you came back pale and thin as paper. A little under two years without sight or word of you, and there you were all of a sudden with your weight off one foot, an animal that has been shot in the flank, not the heart. Like I said before, a wounded wolf. The flank slack; head hung, shoulders dropped, eyes half closed. Sore is the word that comes. You were always quite solemn and meek in profile, something that surprised me every time I caught you from the side; this day you were especially meek and harmless—maybe it was the dip of your head, or the way your head looked too heavy for your shoulders. But when I walked nearer you looked up, flashing pure irony, and you smiled ruefully in the way people do when they think something morbid is funny.

  I wonder if not being able to see ourselves is one of the great paradoxes of being alive—knowing oneself intimately and also not at all. You turn to look at your own profile in the mirror and it is gone. It means we can harbour all kinds of illusions about ourselves that others can see through as clear as day. What I mean is that if you had been able to see yourself objectively that afternoon you might have realised that the game was lost, but instead I think you fancied yourself in some little role in some little story in which you were the heroic returner, the one much waited for, the one who would be forgiven by some obscure law of justice that grants immunity to the tragic.

  It was late October, and I suppose there is something heroic and melancholy about autumn and these monolithic trees unable to keep for themselves a single leaf, and things coming home and coming in and coming back and preparing to shelter again. And the world is going down onto its knees. You show up on a station platform in October of 1986, after almost two years without word. One train after another pulling in and out of the station while you stood watching and waiting for nothing. You had been there for hours before you called us to pick you up. To your mind’s eye you might have been positively operatic, a woman in her late thirties alone at a station in an ankle-length out-of-fashion dress and a shawl and her hair wrapped up in a green scarf, standing beneath the transom of the waiting-room window where she holds defiantly to the burden of her beauty. Leaves gathering at her suitcase and feet, like the children she never had. Tell me you did not think like this.

  You think like this because it is difficult to accept that when we find ourselves most operatic we are usually just farcical. I could cry to think of you now, the way you turned to smile at me when I walked up to you. You had the Devil dull and black in your eye. You were too thin and you were not old enough to look as old as you did, which is not to say you were no longer beautiful—for an overwhelming minority of people, beauty is an affliction they have to bear regardless of what they do to themselves, and which prompts other people to expect too much from them. Fools others, I mean, into thinking that the beautiful always have cause for hope. I expect you had already fooled fifty people that day. Maybe you could have fooled me too, had it not been for one thing, your shawl, the tear at its left shoulder. Or maybe that is overstating it. But it was the torn shawl that I remember most. How can one ripped piece of fabric call up such loss, somehow, of dignity, or of eligibility in this world, of care for oneself? And it was a cold windy day, but your shoulder through the hole was bare. Because of this blind spot we find ourselves in, you won’t have known how scandalous that shoulder looked, sharp and white, with its little collection of thrusting bones. You exposed yourself on that chilly platform like a degenerate in a city park. Scandalous; a strong word, but I mean it. Even the trains hurried their passengers in, with a sort of motherly protectiveness, and rattled away.

  * * *

  Our conversation in the car at the station went something like, ‘What happened to you?’, to whi
ch you replied, ‘What happened to me? I happened to me. That’s always my problem.’

  ‘You look terrible.’

  ‘It’s kind of you to notice.’

  ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Somewhere north of your opinion, where it’s cold.’ You might be interested to know that I since realised this was a vague and spliced bit of Twelfth Night (which I happened to see with Ruth last year). You might have also said something like, ‘I’ve been walking through the blizzards of your disapproval. I have been in the Arctic of your disgust.’ I don’t know; whatever it was you said while we sat in the car at the station, it was oblique and facetious and aloof, purposefully insincere. I turned the ignition key.

  ‘So you haven’t come back to say you’re sorry, then,’ I said. ‘Or to see if I’ll forgive you. Just to stretch out like a cat on your old territory.’

  I have a feeling you didn’t answer, but watched me all the way home out of the corner of your eye.

  This music we hear now is vocalese; it is not your favourite. You would call it mewling or warbling. You would say, Why are you listening to a record played backwards?

  Well, it is not my favourite either, but when you hear somebody do it well, the singing voice sounds just like the instrument, not so that you can’t tell them apart, but so that the voice takes on the instrument’s qualities in the way that a Cézanne painting finds the qualities of a given landscape, without slavishly reproducing it. It just looks, and picks out what it considers true. I like this about it. I have had the window open all evening and let the music from Jimmie’s drift in while dusk comes and the buildings disintegrate. The best song I’ve heard (which isn’t to say I have heard them all) was a woman’s rendition of ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’, her voice had the saxophone’s hollow depth that most other singers never manage. Climbing up and down the scales to a background of percussion.