Gerontius

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Why, then, amid this waft of chicanery does the dreamer still bother to climb? After so many years of living in this shadow he has to ask a question of the man who is variously considered a saint, shaman, madman, freak. The stories are famous, of course: how he joined a monastery when he was sixteen and dismayed his fellow-monks by his excessive austerities. They say he had himself buried upright in a hole in the ground, the sand filled back in and packed up to his chin, thus passing the livelong Syrian summer in a forgotten corner of the monastery garden. It is claimed he spent more and more time thinking up increasingly inventive privations. One Lent he had himself walled up in his cell for the entire forty days with nothing but a single loaf and a pitcher of water and when at the end they broke down the wall they found both loaf and water untouched and Simyun unmoved from the precise posture of prayer in which the masons had last seen him. It is commonly believed that he was finally dismissed from the monastery not only because he made his brothers feel they were positive sybarites by comparison but because his superior believed Simyun was taking a perverse pleasure in such performances. Whatever the reason he went off into the desert and sat on a tall stone without shade or food, relying on his disciples (for he was already famous) to give him bread and water. They say it was to escape his own disciples that he began to raise his platform ever higher above them until he lived as he does today at the top of a column fifty-eight feet tall. Already he has spent seventeen years standing on a circle of stone which measures three feet across and is ringed by a wooden parapet fitted with a crude lectern against which he may lean to doze, for up there he might literally fall asleep and keep on falling.

  It is hard to believe a mere showman would have endured a fraction of such privations. After all, it is not Simyun who makes any money from his feat but Rahut. What accrues to Simyun is world-wide fame (for which he cares nothing) and the respectful pilgrimage of the wisest men of the age (for whom he temporarily forgoes his visionary agony to deal with their requests for advice). Sometimes he writes letters at his lectern by way of reply, handing them over in silence to ecclesiastical hierarchs who are hanging there on the uppermost rungs of the ladder fifty-eight feet above the stony ground, their eyes on a level with his ankles, the tendons of their hands gleaming in the unshaded blaze in which he lives. These letters are then carried to all parts of the world, to Asia Minor, to Constantinople, Athens, Alexandria, to be read to the churches there.

  Why is the dreamer climbing? Why is he allowing the ground to fall away, the distant booths to come into view with their motley of relics, their brilliant bolts of Chinese silks brought by the traders’ caravans from the other end of earth? What might this man know which could conceivably profit him, raised as the saint has been for so much of his life above the plane of ordinary mortals? Hands and feet dumbly answer rung by rung. The climber cannot say how he knows, but he nonetheless does know that this man is not like those bogus anchorites of Alexandria who live on fallen obelisks and are supposed to be carnal in the grossest ways with all manner of passers-by including, it is said, sheep and goats. The Emperor Julian himself referred to them as ‘filthy and superstitious’. Simyun, to whose life people are drawn as moth to flame, has not the least thing in common with such layabouts. He thrives on denial; his pains have made him pure.

  The dreamer is nearing the top. From overhead comes no sound, no cleared throat, no scuff of shifted position, no murmuring of prayer. Only, this blue emptiness and dazzle which surrounds him is pervaded with a faint and uniform hiss as of the sun’s rays racing through air. The universe is filled with his heart-beat: not a sound from below, not a sound from above. Off to his right, maybe a foot away or maybe a million miles, a vertical black line runs. It is the rope of knotted leather strips which the saint uses to haul up his water-skins and frugal meals, for except on days of Audience an uncured thong is Simyun’s only tangible link with the world beneath. On days of Audience such as today Rahut puts up this ladder for the upward pilgrimage. This itself is something of a test of a supplicant’s sincerity for it bounces and flexes at each footfall and the narrow curved stonework against which its top rests seems designed to shed rather than support ladders, to send them skidding off into space on either side. There have indeed been accidents. The mayor of Sisan, Simyun’s birthplace, was killed a year or two ago when the top of the ladder slipped. He had gone to ask Simyun’s blessing on a plan to turn the saint’s home town into an official shrine but whether a commercial interest lay beneath this apparently pious scheme is not known. Clinging like a beetle to the toppling ladder he made a descending arc across the blue Syrian heavens and smashed against the desert. Amen. Some said he was drunk. Simyun never spoke of the matter.

  In fact it is believed the saint is protected by God from all that is trivial or defiled, that only the worthy ever get to address him. This seems unlikely, for how else would he remain in touch with the dark doings of this world such that his advice is treasured for its wise and practical nature? Yet perhaps God does protect Simyun from all agencies of physical harm, maybe in recompense for the terrible pains he inflicts on himself in sacrifice. His mere existence has been politically contentious and an attempt was once made to poison his food. But as he was hauling it up it is said a great hawk came swooping out of an empty sky, cut the thong with its beak and carried the food off in its claws, letting it fall to the ground a safe distance away. And even today on the very spot there grows a twisted black tree of a kind no-one has ever seen before whose wood is so hard that even a scimitar cannot nick it. The dreamer has himself seen this tree but would not presume to judge the truth of the tale. On the other hand he does know that boys from his village used to go out by night and shoot at the saint for target practice as he stood there outlined against the constellations. And yet never once was he hit, which is almost incredible given that even at fifteen Badur was reckoned the finest bowman of the Three Cities. Indeed, on one of these excursions Hadath was himself injured by an arrow of Badur’s and this can only be reckoned the saint’s kindly retribution, for the wound hurt abominably the rest of that night yet was cured without trace by morning. Thus it is ordained that none may harm Simyun but Simyun himself.

  And so the dreamer has arrived. His left hand is now holding the topmost rung. On a level with his eyes are two naked feet and ankles, hugely swollen. Both his hands could not encompass one of the saint’s ankles, so puffed up and black are they. The air is filled with an extraordinary smell – extraordinary, that is, because there are no flowers here. How did he expect a saint to smell? Surely no worse than a sick animal, having had no washing but winter rains for seventeen years. What one eats also determines how one smells, and Simyun eats no meat but only the simplest bread and pulses. Nevertheless there is a faint scent of flowers, although no flowers the dreamer recognises. Maybe now and then Rahut sends up some supplicant’s precious gift, a vial of rare attar, priceless essence of blooms which open in Tartary or China at the other end of those great caravan trails.

  The feet before his face are so huge their pain fills the entire circle of stonework. Between them, embedded in the stone itself, is an iron ring from which a black chain leads up against stained rags. He raises his eyes to the dazzle of the sky. Simyun is tethered by the neck around which is an iron collar set with inward-facing nails. It pierces to the heart, the sight of this transfigured animal whose neck is bloated and cicatrised by the ever-unhealing wounds of seventeen years. Otherwise the man is black with the sun where he is not grey with ragged hair and beard.

  ‘At last you are here, then.’ His voice comes down to the dreamer who is startled at how gentle and young it sounds. A creature like this, all iron and sinew and suffering, should have a voice to match – the voice of a raven, the cracked cry of a prophet. Is this perhaps the greeting with which he addresses all his visitors? ‘Why do you hesitate? Step up. Don’t be alarmed, boy.’

  He may be all-knowing but how is it he doesn’t see the evident impossibility of fitting another person on
to that tiny island of stone? A scarred hand reaches down at the end of an arm like the branch of a tree which has been blasted by lightning. The arm seems so long as to be endless, as if stretching to another world. Then the hand grasps the dreamer’s wrist and pulls him to his feet and he is astonished to find the area is larger than he imagined – so much so, indeed, that there is even room to pace about. He is filled with wonder, with awe. The proximity of sainthood is overpowering. What manner of man is this? For, looking about him, the dreamer now sees he is in a land of its own. They are standing in a small courtyard bounded on three sides by a stone parapet; on the fourth side is a white pavilion with slender spires and windows from which puff out damask curtains. Through an open doorway is a view of a cool green garden, red and white flowers, the fraying spatter of a fountain. The sound of birdsong and water pours through to them in the courtyard.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he says, suddenly frightened to look at the saint. ‘Are we in paradise?’

  ‘Ah, maybe we are,’ says Simyun. A butterfly floats through the doorway and alights on his wrist where it opens and shuts its brilliant wings as if breathing sunlight. ‘Whatever paradise may be.’

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘It’s all paradise.’

  The dreamer thinks of Simyun’s awesome sufferings. He suspects he is after all one of those desert mystics, no matter what his powers. The man appears to read this thought.

  ‘For me suffering is my particular path, my gateway. It is not so for most of the world. I was once as saddened as anyone by the pain of the world. I used to argue that a merciful God hardly needed offerings of involuntary pain from his often guiltless creatures. That notion made me sadder still until I realised there is no God who needs or wants anything. There is pain just as there is wind or cold. I further discovered that I am the nonexistent God, just as you are. So my pain is a wilful gift to myself which has enabled me to see in different ways.’

  The dreamer ought to be utterly confused by these blasphemies and obscurities. At any rate the question which stands for him and which he has carried like a pearl up the ladder to present to Simyun vanishes from his mind. The saint takes his arm and leads him to the parapet. On all horizons the view stretches: the distant white buildings of Antioch, the pinkish nearby hills, Mount Admirable. He can just see his house with the vineyard nearby, Rastul’s herd grazing.

  ‘Before I learned how to do away with time,’ says Simyun in his young man’s voice, ‘I would stand here and watch the changes as they occurred. The city, for example, has practically doubled in size since I first came here. There is less cultivation in the hills but more traders with their caravans. I used often to be overwhelmed by the beauty of the world. At other times when my legs were on fire from standing, my head was on fire with noon, my neck was ablaze with the drag of iron and nails, I could not rise above my pain and the very landscape became listless and hateful. Often I cursed the nonexistent God for my self-inflicted exile. I imagine that strikes you as perverse?’

  He cannot reply. If this is sainthood then the real and actual world of its speech and living leave him without words. Yet there is something about it which can be understood.

  ‘But it eased. It always does if you keep on. Then I saw the same landscape but differently. You thought my life up here was either one long beatific vision or a boring wasteland of suffering? Well, it is neither. A lot happens here, you know. One notices everything: ants crossing the stones, lizards in the cracks, birds in the sky, the seasons’ changing. Can you imagine how exciting it is when winter storms leave one roaring in space, the ground invisible below a fog of sand? Or when in spring the lightnings strike all round? At such moments I find it easy to remember I am wearing chain and yet so far no lightning has come close enough to singe me.’

  As he speaks the dreamer notices it is rapidly becoming dark. There are feeble yellow lights in the far city, closer orange glows marking the traders’ dung fires. There is a brilliant sliver of new moon in the sky among the limitless starfields.

  ‘Now and then a strange beast used to prowl below,’ remarks Simyun. ‘It looked like half-lion, half-gazelle. It had a choking tawny smell like musk and burning carpets. It came very rarely but when it did it lay on the ground at the foot of this tower and looked up and I saw its eyes were glowing. Then the eyes would leave its body and float up towards me, revolving slowly like gems – rubies, garnets, I can’t tell the stone. When they reached me I plucked them from the air and immediately I could be through my fists everything the beast had ever been. I could see far countries and feel sharp climates; I tasted carrion and fresh kid; I was the music a shepherd makes alone in the desert; I knew strange tongues. Once I was filled with longing by these things, by a ravenous yearning to pad about inviolate through all the marches of the world for myself, hearing and tasting and doing and seeing like my beast.’

  ‘When did he last come?’

  ‘Three years ago. He will never come back because I now know who he is.’

  ‘And who is he?’

  ‘Myself. I can see with his eyes and hear with his ears any time I want. I never realised it, that’s all. I thought I had to wait for him. I think I have killed my significant beast.’

  The dreamer doesn’t understand why the saint speaks half sadly as if he had murdered a real thing. He turns from the parapet and, glancing towards the dark pavilion, is surprised to see a single lighted window with behind the curtain the filmiest suggestion of movement within the chamber beyond. At once he thinks of a waiting bride but as soon as this impious and foolish notion defines itself he dismisses it. Anchorites have no brides, saints no desire for mistresses, visionaries who can walk amid beasts and angels in the sky surely have no need of company. The night breeze through the passage from the courtyard beyond brings with it something so sweet he cannot tell if it falls on his ears or his nose or whether he tastes it in the air. He is so laved by it his entire skin absorbs it from every direction, a ravishment such as he has never known.

  ‘What is it?’ he asks.

  ‘What it is. Call it what you like. Music, why not?’

  And at once it gathers in his ears and he perceives that it is, after all, music. But it is quite unlike anything he has ever heard before, so beautiful and strange and new. It arouses a longing in him that is akin to pain and nothing seems worth-while but just to hear that sound and go on listening to it for ever.

  ‘Can you hear it?’

  ‘I am it,’ Simyun says. ‘You too, of course.’

  In the luminous night he glimmers beside him, no longer a tortured saint on swollen black feet and chained by the neck like a dog. He is powerful, lithe. His hands rest on the parapet like a captain’s conning his ship as it forges outward across serene seas. He is confidence.

  ‘Can you remember your question?’ he asks. ‘No, you’ve forgotten it. Never mind. Don’t bother with being mortified. I’ll tell you how it was with me instead, and that will answer it. I was sixteen when I left home with my brother to become a monk. He was a year or two older, more mature, more sensible. He went to an order at Tunis in Cilicia; I entered the Brotherhood of Mysteries over on the far side of Mount Admirable.’ A pale sleeve raises to point to the east. ‘But from the first I was not like the other novices. It was not that I was any holier or more pious and nor was my faith any greater than theirs. Much of the time it was rather less, actually. Throughout my novitiate I hated doing anything with the others, whether it was attending services or prayers or just gardening and working in the kitchens. I always yearned for my cell or the desert. I didn’t mind my fellow-men, you understand, but I knew their mere presence blurred me in some way. I couldn’t concentrate. I believed I had a mission but I was unsure what it was. My superiors despaired of me, condemning me as guilty of the sin of abominable pride thus to set myself apart from the rest of the community. “Maybe I am called to be a hermit,” I told them. “Maybe I should leave the Order and go alone into the desert among the snakes and the lit
tle foxes to shiver at night beneath a quilt of stars.” “You are not fit to be a hermit,” they told me. “You may have the fortitude but you lack the humility. You do not wish to efface yourself; you have no desire to become lost.”

  ‘They gave me punishments, indulgences. But even as they did so they were playing my game. I became notorious throughout the Order as the most-punished novice. I added to that notoriety by devising mortifications of my own which outdid the worst they wished to inflict on me. At last they wearied of me as incorrigible, divisive, mad. I was expelled, not so much with curses as with absolutions as if I had been a crazed dog they feared might seek revenge if too harshly turned away. Hardly a model monk, you’re thinking, and you’re perfectly right. What, then, was this ridiculous mission of mine? If I tell you perhaps you’ll find it hard to believe, it’s so simple and unmomentous. It was this: to be myself. By creating myself, by uncovering my divinity I could reveal the divine to the world. It was not in me to be a monk among others but it was in me to be what a poet will one day call me, “the watcher on the column”, which of course also implies that I am watched. Thus I am an example, a revelation. Pain is a gateway, not an end in itself. There are many gateways, this is mine. I recommend it to no-one but I commend to everyone the garden which lies beyond.

  ‘Most of the people who come to see me are fools. No, that’s uncharitable … not fools perhaps but not ready to understand which questions to ask. They want to know what they should do to lead a good life. You weren’t going to ask that? No; you’re already too thoughtful. Good and bad are human value judgements without the slightest meaning. There, that’s the language of saints. I see you once imagined yourself going on an immense journey to a land across the desert so distant that our whole world winked out on the horizon at your back. You fancied you eventually came across a group of creatures or people roasting and eating one of their own kind. And you thought you had at last identified the common enemy, the anathema, until one of them said, “We have heard there are monsters elsewhere in the world who commit the ultimate blasphemy with their dead and lay them in the earth for worms and foxes instead of taking them back into the common body with honour and love.” And you didn’t know what to say.’