The Cemetery in Barnes

by Gabriel Josipovici

  No…

  It was a mystery how the simple flowing lines of Monteverdi could have such an effect on one, filling one with a strange emotion which seemed to consist of both joy and sorrow, both bitterness and a sweetness past imagining:

  N’andrò sicuro a’più profondi abissi,

  E intenerito il cor del Re dell’ombre,

  Meco trarrotti a riveder le stele,

  Oh, se ciò negherammi empio destino,

  Rimarrò teco, in compagnia di morte

  Addio terra, addio cielo e sole, addio.

  I shall go down to the most profound abyss,

  And, having softened the heart of the King of Shades,

  Bring you back with me to see the stars again;

  Or, if an evil fate denies me this,

  With you I will remain in the company of the dead.

  Farewell earth! Farewell sky and sun, farewell!

  He would take his time over dinner, reading the paper or studying his fellow diners, then climb the steps to the little flat and spend the evening reading or listening to Monteverdi, first sitting in the rocking chair in the corner and then lying in the bath with the door open and steam billowing up to the ceiling and down again, for the fan had long since ceased to function and the landlord was elusive.

  You are dead, oh my life, and I breathe on?

  You have left me

  Never to return, and I remain?

  No…

  He loved to lie in the large, old-fashioned tub with his feet flat against the tap end, two purple blobs barely visible through the steam. He thought of those large paintings Bonnard had done of his wife Marthe lying in her bath, where the bathroom tiles are so alive and the floating woman so like a corpse. Why did they move him so much, while that huge painting by one of the pre-Raphaelites – Millais, was it? or Burne-Jones? – of the drowned Ophelia, said to be the most popular picture in the Tate, left him totally unmoved? Was it because the pre-Raphaelite artist had put all his effort into making Ophelia pathetic while Bonnard had put his into catching the light of the bathroom, forcing us to recognise that we are all temporal creatures, emerging into the light for a few brief seconds before we disappear again?

  As often as not, while he was caught up in these imponderables the record would come to an end, jerking him back into the present. He would leap up, grab a towel, dry his feet as best he could on the mat, and dash into the room to turn it over, then, back in the bathroom, slowly dry himself and put on his pyjamas.

  On weekends in Putney he and his wife would often cycle along the towpath to Kew or Richmond Park and, in Kew, go and see the exotic plants in one of the greenhouses or, in Richmond Park, wander through the ferns looking out for the deer. In Paris the days merged into one another and he saw no reason, his job being what it was, ever to take a day off from his strict routine.

  You were always so conscientious, his wife – his second wife – would say. You would sooner have died than been late with a typescript.

  If I hadn’t had my routine I don’t know what would have happened to me, he would say. It was the routine that kept me going.

  You have to draw the line between a fruitful and a compulsive routine, she would say. The trouble is he could never draw that line.

  But can one always know where the line is to be drawn? he would ask, smiling.

  All their friends agreed that there was a remarkable sense of peace pervading their house. You could feel it, they would say, the moment you stepped inside the front door.

  Peace comes with happiness, he would say, and who can say where happiness comes from?

  Sometimes, on a Sunday, after a morning in Richmond Park, they would sit in a pub by the river and have lunch. His wife didn’t talk much, did not pester him with questions about his work. She sat with her eyes closed and a smile on her lips, her face turned to the sun which glinted in her corn-blond hair and brought out the touches of red in it. Afterwards they would retrieve their bicycles and ride home along the towpath.

  As he sat in his armchair, high up above the rue Lucrèce, listening to his latest purchase, he would allow his mind to wander back to his years in Putney. Sometimes hours would go by in this fashion and he would suddenly wake up to the fact that the record had come to an end and was still turning round and round with a faint hiss. He would stare into space for a few minutes, willing himself to get up and turn it over, though often he would merely lurch forward and pull the plug out before settling back again in the armchair and closing his eyes. Gradually the hum of traffic from the rue Saint Jacques would rise up and assail his ears, but he would not move.

  One day, indulging his drowning fantasies more than usual, he did not go back to his room after lunch. Instead he walked down the hill and across the river to the Île Saint-Louis and then across again and up in the direction of the Bastille. He must have walked for two or three hours, his mind a blank, because he suddenly realised that he felt utterly exhausted and could not walk another step. There was a café on the other side of the road, so he crossed over and went in. It was empty at that time of day except for the patron in his shirtsleeves, polishing the counter. He eased himself onto a stool and ordered a coffee. When it came he downed it in one go and ordered another. The acrid taste sent a shudder through him.

  When the second cup arrived he toyed with it a little longer, dipping a lump of sugar and watching the dark liquid eat into the white cube, letting the brown fragments drop into the coffee as he slowly stirred, gazing down at the spoon as he did so. By the time he had drunk his second cup he felt restored and wondered how he could have reached the state of exhaustion he had just been in.

  I need to make a call, he said to the patron, who was busy at the other end of the counter.

  The man stood in front of him, separated by the wide expanse of polished chrome. He was a large man with a red face, his head bald and shiny as a billiard ball but, as if to make up for it, with a bristling moustache and large amounts of black hair sprouting from his ears and covering his arms.

  A token, please, he repeated. For a phone call.

  He thought the man had not heard, then saw that he was in fact holding out his hand, palm upwards. The silver token lay there on his pink skin.

  He looked into the man’s face again. He was grinning, revealing a mouth full of gleaming white teeth and holding out his hand across the polished counter. There it lay, waiting to be picked up. Gingerly he moved his hand forward and reached for it, but just as he was about to pick it up he realised it was no longer there. The large hand was open, palm upwards, but it was empty.

  He looked up quickly. The man was still grinning, staring mockingly back at him. He lowered his eyes again and as he did so the man slowly turned his hand over and there was the token again, a small silver circle lying on the hairy back of the hand. The man thrust his arm forward across the counter, as if to say: Go on, take it. So, once again, he watched his own hand going out to meet the other, and this time his fingers closed round the token and he lifted it off the hand and drew it back towards him. As he did so he saw the hole. It was a small round black hole in the middle of the man’s hand, just where the token had been, and it was smoking gently.

  He must have walked a lot more after that. He didn’t remember where or for how long, but towards the end of the afternoon he found himself by the river again. Automatically he began to browse the bookstalls on the quais but his mind wouldn’t focus. He didn’t want to go back to his flat but his feet felt swollen and were hurting and he felt he had to take off his shoes or he would begin to cry. He found some stairs and staggered down them to the level of the water. There was a patch of grass at the bottom where a tree grew under a high wall. He sat down slowly, leaning back against the trunk, closed his eyes and fumbled with the laces of his shoes. When his feet were free at last he opened his eyes again and sat motionless, staring down at the water.

  When the girl came it had grown almost dark. He couldn’t make out her face, only the glint of red hair under a lit
tle green beret. For a moment, in the half-light, she reminded him of his wife.

  He must have spoken, because she said: You are English?

  Yes.

  I guess.

  Oh?

  Yes. I guess.

  He couldn’t place her accent.

  It is hot today, she said.

  Yes.

  He wanted to talk to her about the token but checked himself.

  She took off the beret, shaking her head and releasing a mass of red hair, which fell in cascades round her shoulders.

  Hold please, she said, handing him the beret. It was curiously small and soft.

  She had taken a brush out of her little bag and was brushing her hair, moving her head in time to the strokes. Then the brush vanished as abruptly as it had appeared and she took the beret back from him, swept up her hair and put it on again, this time at rather more of an angle than before.

  He was looking at the lights of the city reflected in the water when she said to him: Can I put my head here, yes?

  Without waiting for a reply she swung round, tucking her legs under her skirt, and laid her head on his lap.

  Her eyes were closed and he thought she had gone to sleep, but then she began to move her head on his lap, slowly at first, as though trying to find the most comfortable position, then with gathering violence. He stroked her hair. The beret fell off, releasing her hair once again. She began to moan.

  They must have got up together. He could remember nothing after that except that her room was red. Like fire, she said.

  He found himself walking again, swaying like a drunk in the noonday blaze of a Parisian summer. His trousers felt too tight, his thighs itched where the cloth rubbed against the skin. His whole body felt as though it had been scraped with a knife from his forehead to the soles of his feet.

  When he finally stumbled home he was so tired he could hardly get the key into the lock. He fell onto the bed fully clothed and was immediately asleep.

  When he woke it was dark. He didn’t know if he had slept for six hours or sixty. To judge from his ravening hunger it was probably the latter. He found some food in the fridge and wolfed it down. Then he struggled into his pyjamas and crawled into bed.

  The next time he awoke it was early morning. He groped his way out of bed and to the window for his daily look at the dome of the Panthéon. As he was doing so, craning a little to the left as usual, he remembered that all had not been entirely normal in the past day or two. Alternative lives, he thought to himself, then made his breakfast and settled down to translating the novel on his desk.

  It was only that evening, as he was having his bath, that he saw the wound. It was a long, straight cut, like the scratch of a cat, and ran all the way from the top of his right thigh to the knee. He touched it gently but it didn’t hurt. He dried it carefully, examined it again and decided that there was nothing to do but to let it heal and disappear. In fact, though, it never entirely disappeared. Years later, in Wales, whenever he talked of his Paris years he would point to his leg and laugh and say: It never healed.

  You didn’t want it to, his wife would say.

  Friends who had known him in the old days would comment on the resemblance between his two wives. Especially when his second wife stood in the middle of the room like that, dusting an LP before handing it to him saying, You really didn’t want it to, did you?

  No, he would say, looking at her as he crouched by the turntable, waiting to receive the disk from her. No I didn’t, did I?

  He’s so superstitious, she would say. He never went to a doctor about it.

  What could a doctor do?

  Maybe give you something to get rid of it.

  We’ve all got something like that somewhere on our bodies, he would say. Maybe if we got rid of it we wouldn’t be ourselves any more. Who knows?

  He would tell of his fantasies of drowning, vivid images he experienced at the time he was living in Paris after the death of his first wife. As I sank I would feel quite relieved, he would say. I would think: There goes another life – and know I had not finished with this one.

  One sprouts so many selves, he would say, and look at her and smile. One is a murderer. One a suicide. One lives in Paris. One in Bombay. One in New York.

  One, one, one, she would echo, mocking him.

  Occasionally, in Putney, he would wait outside Putney Bridge tube station, but not in his usual place. Hidden behind a newspaper stand he would observe the commuters streaming out of the station, heads bowed, eyes blank with weariness. Then he would see her. She would stand for a moment at the exit, not looking round for him but simply waiting for him to come up to her if he was there. After a few seconds, when he did not appear, she would start off across the street and disappear under the shadow of the footbridge.

  I remember her so clearly, he would say, as she stood quite still, waiting, and the crowds swirled round her. I remember her so well.

  He would give her time to climb the stairs, then slowly follow. It moved him to see her like this, from the outside, as it were, a young woman with a light step and straight fair-to-reddish hair. She never turned round or stopped to look at the water but continued on her way, evenly, unhurriedly. And he, walking always a good way behind, did not take his eyes off her.

  As she turned into Carlton Drive he would walk on down the Upper Richmond Road towards Wandsworth, then circle back over the little footbridge above the girls’ school, giving her time to get home and settle before he himself returned. He never told her he had been following her. When driven, as he often was, by her lack of curiosity about the way he had spent his day to give her a detailed account of his comings and goings, he always made sure he left the last hour or two vague.

  Though he loved words and the rhythms of language he had neither the desire nor the ability to make something of his own with them. What made him happy, he realised, was the act of sitting down at his desk, the feel of the stack of empty sheets of foolscap under his hand and the lamp shining on the open book in front of him. Occasionally he felt a tug at his heart at the thought of how utterly useless and without consequence the work was that he was doing, but when this did happen he would quickly remind himself how lucky he was to be able to earn his living in his own way, without the need to travel to and from a place of work, or have to take orders from people he could not stand. And though at first he had to suffer the indignity of being a private tutor in order to supplement his meagre translator’s income, by the time he got to Paris his stock had so risen with the publishers for whom he worked that he was able to live, if only just, on what he earned from his translations. I am one of the lucky ones, he would say to the friends who were visiting Paris and with whom he would have a meal or a drink. My needs are simple. I do what I am good at and the world is prepared to leave me alone. What more could I want?

  It was in Paris that he had begun to translate the sonnets of du Bellay. He worked at mealtimes, or while waiting for the bus, or – sometimes – in the evening, with Orfeo or the Goldberg Variations (he preferred the harpsichord of Gustav Leonhard to the overhyped piano-playing of Glenn Gould) on the gramophone.

  Je ne chante (Magny), je pleure mes ennuys;

  Ou, pour le dire mieulx, en pleurant je les chante,

  Si bien qu’en les chantant, souvent je les enchante:

  Voyla pourquoy (Magny) je chante jours et nuicts.

  How wonderful to be able to use a friend’s name in that way in a poem, he thought, and what is a translator to do with that marvellous mute ‘l’ in mieulx and ‘c’ in nuicts, which slows down the reading and gives the word a definition and a weight which the modern French mieux and nuit simply do not have? Or is this only our perception? Would a sixteenthcentury Frenchman not perhaps have felt exactly the same about mieulx with an ‘l’ as his modern French counterpart feels towards mieux without? Be that as it may, to the modern ear and eye the earlier spelling gives a weight, a strangeness, to the word which the modern spelling does not and colours how we rea
d. But how to carry that across in English?

  I do not sing, Magny, but weep my woes,

  Or rather say, in weeping I them chant,

  So that by chanting them I them enchant:

  And that is why, Magny, I sing both day and night.

  And since this is a quatrain about enchantment, the old-fashioned ‘I them chant’ and ‘I them enchant’ – so difficult to justify in a modern translation, and not even present in du Bellay’s direct and workaday syntax – almost come off. Almost. Never quite. But almost, he came to recognise, was the best he at any rate could hope for.

  Even then, so many years later, in the secluded farmhouse in the Black Mountains, he could still recall the volume he had used: a paperback edition of the Antiquités de Rome and the Regrets, with the reproduction of a painting of the ruins of Rome by some Renaissance artist on the cover.

  He gave me a copy of that book when we first met, his wife – his second wife – would say. He even wrote a charming dedication on the inside.

  I loved it as though I had written it myself, he would say. And now I doubt if there is even a copy of it in the house.

  Everything has its time, she would say. When its time has passed it is foolish to lament it.

  He agreed with her, admired her sturdy common sense, her handsome bearing, her way with people. Their friends and acquaintances commented on the harmony of their relationship and on the peace and calm that was so palpable the moment one entered their house.

  Not that life in Paris had lacked peace and calm. If your habits are regular, he would say as he selected another record to put on the gramophone, then you are in a position to respond to the world and its gifts. But most of us, most of the time, spurn these gifts and complain about our lot.

  He had never been the complaining type, he said, had always accepted even the most painful blows with a kind of stubborn resignation.

  Stubborn makes it sound so good, his wife – his second wife – would say, but in reality, if you want to know my opinion, it’s not so different from being one of the living dead.