In the Memorial Room

by Frame, Janet

  Even then, when Elizabeth came into the sitting-room, as she would do, on some pretext or other, she’d stoop to dislodge from the carpet a crumb that had escaped the absorbing power of the carpet sweeper.

  It was after my third month at Menton – April had just begun – when I woke one morning to realise that I was indeed deaf. It was no joke, no dream, no imagination; and so I would not laugh, wake or rejoice.

  14

  At first I lay quietly, trying to surprise myself into hearing a sound and listening with acute attention, turning my head this way and that to receive the sound waves from the air. There was no interior sound as of rushing of my blood or beating of my heart as I had supposed, in the rare moments when I thought of deafness, would be emphasised and amplified. I cleared my throat. I heard nothing. I laughed selfconsciously, Ha Ha Ha. Still I heard nothing. I tapped my hand on the wall beside my bed. I switched on my small transistor radio. None of these actions resulted in sound. There was a velvet soundlessness that was not even silence. One might have thought that it had snowed in the night, snowed right up over the brim of the world. An enormous fatigue came over me as I imagined that I would now spend the rest of my life straining to listen. I closed my eyes and sank into a nothingness which became sleep, and when I woke once again an hour had passed and the sun had set three narrow panels of light on the wall opposite my bed.

  I was still deaf. I shook my head and began again turning this way and that to trap the waves of sound, but it was no use. I began to think of practical matters. Consulting a doctor, Dr Rumor. Then, I felt I wanted to keep my deafness secret. But supposing it was a symptom of a serious condition? I was young enough to feel that the only serious condition could be that leading to a swift death. Dr Rumor then. Oh Dr Rumor, I have this problem.

  —Yes, what seems to be the trouble?

  Then I realised that I’d not hear him, that he would have to write down his questions, unless I were able to lip-read. I jumped out of bed and stared in the mirror. I spoke, —How are you today, exaggerating the movement of my lips, but as I could not hear what I was saying, there was a distance about my image which frightened me. I heard, mentally, How are you, and I wondered if there might come a time when I could no longer have an image of sound, when the words How are you would become objects to look at as I was now looking at myself, at my moving lips, at the panels of sunlight. Then a more practical thought came to me. I wanted this Fellowship in Menton. I wanted to keep it. If some drastic physical condition overcame me I should have to relinquish the Fellowship and return to New Zealand. I decided that I must keep the deafness secret. It could only be temporary. I’d consult Dr Rumor. I’d write down what I wanted to say to him. (Deafness was already giving me a reluctance to talk.)

  Then a sentence came to mind: ‘The blind man, in his fury, struck out with his white stick.’

  How would I strike out in my fury? With my hearing aid, and have the world laughing at me? How would I know, when I spoke, if my voice were too loud or too soft? I’d often been startled by the shouting of those who were deaf. (He’s deaf, that’s why he shouts.)

  Beethoven…

  How comforting to ally oneself with the great. He could still hear, mentally: auditory images were different, depending largely on memory, and as I was only thirty-three and my memory was good and I’d had thirty-three years of hearing…

  Fifteen minutes later I was preparing breakfast for myself, standing in the small kitchen in front of the refrigerator and the grand stove with its glass-doored oven and its thermostatic palpeur. Normally, the refrigerator made a sound like a distant jet plane with a background of a high-pitched whine, while the stove, in use, sang a more subdued note, a low-pitched hum if the left-hand plate were set at its highest, ten.

  The kitchen was silent. I was silent. My footsteps made no sound, the external world sent no sound through the windows; a loosened window-catch set one window swinging to and fro, and the slight breeze swaying the palm trees did not cause the usual shuffling of leaves as if unseen footsteps were following a path in the air. Presently I grew used to the soundlessness. A train passed. I felt the vibrations through my body. I felt the house brace itself against the assault of the train-sound but I heard no sound: my body received the news of the train; my feet, my belly, knew it was passing.

  I wanted to get out, to get out of myself, to hear. I looked out of the kitchen window as I ate my breakfast. I was an early riser. Few people were up. The Fosters’ curtains were still drawn. In the one huge apartment block beside the Fosters’ one or two lights were on. Someone was rolling up a blind on the third floor balcony.

  A middle-aged man. I’d seen him before, doing his housekeeping, carefully moving the table and chairs as he swept around them, and then sitting by himself to dine, looking out over the olive grove at the sea. Perhaps at this hour he was looking for Corsica which was said to be visible before sunrise, in winter only, though few people had seen it, and seeing it with little effort from two healthy eyes or from two healthy eyes behind carefully trained binoculars, gave one, in Menton, a lifelong cause for pride. Seeing Corsica was a ‘gift’ and as with gifts it was not a case of one’s choosing to see but of being chosen.

  The man in the apartment vigorously shook a mat over the balcony; I could see the dust flying, even from my window. Evidently he was not hoping or trying to see Corsica.

  I know now that in affliction one does not think grand thoughts: one’s thoughts are mean, resentful. Not being able to grasp the fact of my deafness, I turned again to the idea of blindness, thinking, as if it might have been a haven, Now if I had been blind I would be able to say, rousing pity, —I shall never see Corsica. Who will have sympathy for me if I say I can never hear Corsica? I despised myself. I had become a living anticlimax. One does not always quote fiction as a good example for life but, I told myself, I would never have let this happen in fiction – a man going blind who instead becomes deaf, who, concentrating on the drama of looking his last on colour and light and form, suddenly finds himself robbed forever of the first few bars of the Hammerklavier Sonata, of their entering again from the outside world as if they lived there, in comfort and prosperity, as citizens of a respected country.

  I had located my drama: Beethoven would take me by the hand through the paradise and hell of soundlessness, but first, because I was only Harry Gill, I would go to Dr Rumor and say, —Dr Rumor, I’m deaf, stone deaf, I can’t even hear if the new refrigerator is working.

  Therefore, as early as possible, and avoiding any meeting with Dorset and Elizabeth and beginning an acquaintance with the experience of being a Removed Man (my mind played with the use of the word ‘remove’ in the serving of meals, and the controversy about whether the ‘remove’ should be eaten first or last; I had a feeling of horror as I remembered what I had read only a week ago in a cookery book, ‘Hunger and thirst are unlovely things yet they are the foundation for the house of hospitality’), I set out to visit Dr Alberto Rumor in Rue Henry Bennet.

  My walk was unsteady; I had not realised how much the sound of my feet firmly striking the earth had directed my ability to walk. I kept turning my head this way and that, trying to receive and interpret sound, working it like a radar tower, and my confusion increased as I felt my powers of interpretation working overtime on sounds which were nothing but imaginings.

  I saw a heavy truck. I thought I heard it. I became afraid. I began to think I would not get as far as Rue Henry Bennet. I felt very lonely. No one knew I was deaf; I had no signal to put out for attention, sympathy and consideration. My hands cupped behind my ears would invite laughter or smiles. My incomprehension when spoken to would label me, perhaps, as one of the unfortunately disabled who must be arranged for or removed. I hadn’t realised before how much of one’s day is spent in talking to oneself, in listening to body sounds and movements, in uttering now and again small sighs of pleasure or pain, in exclaiming and hearing the exclamation with satisfaction, oneself talking to oneself.

&nb
sp; It occurred to me that my removal was as complete, or seemed so, as if I were invisible; my feeble eyes, perhaps in a kind of jealousy or rivalry, emotions which I’m told eyes are capable of feeling, searched up and down, everywhere they could look, not only for the reassurance of my visibility but for a chance sight of some small sound to carry, with an emphasis of magnanimity, to the threshold, the pavilion, the inner chambers of my ears.

  I was pleased that Dr Rumor remembered me. Even Hamlet’s father’s ghost, for all his demands in the name of memory, would have been pleased by the simple recognition of a smile. Dr Rumor was about to say something to me – he had begun – when I gave him the sheet of paper I had been preparing as I sat in his waiting-room. It said: —I’m totally deaf. Since early this morning I haven’t been able to hear a sound, not even myself breathing.

  Dr Rumor looked at me as at an object. He frowned. I held out my hand for the sheet of writing-paper. I took it and leaning it on the edge of his deck I wrote, —It’s true. I’m deaf. Write to me.

  Reading what I had written I had an impulse to laugh. Write to me, indeed. It sounded as final as ‘Remember me’, a paper utterance made before I set out on a long journey to a land where I would be almost inaccessible.

  Obediently, Dr Rumor wrote, —You’re the young man who consulted me before. The young man in the newspaper photograph, standing beside the Watercress-Armstrong Fellow.

  I read what he had written. I felt erased.

  He drew down the brilliant ceiling light and taking his instruments he began to examine my ears. He took out his watch and held it by each ear. He said something which of course I could not hear. Then he opened his mouth and made a grimace; he looked as if he were shouting for his jaw tensed and thrust out like a container for the sound he was obviously making.

  When he had made all the examination he seemed to require, he raised the light to its normal position, took the sheet of paper and wrote, as if he were sending a telegram, —Can’t help you. Modern disease. Auditory Retaliation. Strategy of War.

  In answer to this peculiar telegram I wrote, —Self-inflicting?

  He wrote in reply, —A sealing-off, a closure. Auditory hibernation.

  —Permanent? A physical condition?

  The telegraphic phrases were appropriate, I thought, for my state of removal.

  He smiled and shook his head. Evidently he did not know.

  He wrote, —Seems to be.

  This was the moment, I thought, when patient and doctor would begin talking about the best specialists in the country, ‘ear-nose-and-throat’. I knew. My father was a doctor. I had been a medical student. I had an aunt with Ménière’s disease, and, while I was studying, several patients with ear disease or malfunction or, now that we are in an age of empirical drugs, malformation. I had seen a child born with tiny ears where its arms should have been, wheat-ears new on a green wheat-stalk. The child could breathe and move but not hear or talk. The child did not live.

  There was no space left on the paper which Dr Rumor and I had used, otherwise I would have written, I thought, —What shall I do?

  Anticipating my question he drew another sheet of paper from his desk drawer, licked the tip of his ballpoint pen (an unhygienic habit I felt for a doctor) and wrote for a few seconds, every now and again glancing at me as if, estimating my character and capabilities, he were writing me a reference for a job.

  He passed the paper over to me. I read, —As I said before, Mr Gill, you are at the point of bisection of circumstances, opportunity, characters, time; everything is favourable for your obliteration. You have been stifled, muffled, silenced. You cannot cry out because you cannot hear the cries of others.

  On an isolated line he had written: Interesting. As if it were in place of: To be recommended. Or: A good worker. Or: Conscientious.

  I wrote, —But what can I do?

  —Mr Harry Gill – is that really your name, by the way? Just wait and see. I think your condition will cure itself. I give it four months.

  —Four months! And wait and see! What about, Wait and Hear! Hear nothing! Four months is the time of my Fellowship. What are you hinting?

  —Trust me. Wait and see.

  As I was leaving I put out my hand for my pen which Dr Rumor had pocketed; his own was still in his hand. He apologised. I went as quickly as I could from his consulting room. He was as unbelievable a doctor as ever I had met. I glanced at the brass plate at the door to make certain that it had not been I who had created him and his unbelievability – no, I read: ‘Dr Alberto Rumor, Specialist in General Medicine’.

  How hard it is to be oneself! What is oneself? Always one must do as others are doing, even if it is the others who lived in a stone age or other ages than ours – even the old man finds his hero; the poet of seventy, who has written quietly, mostly unadmired, for many years, begins to draw the inspiration of his daily life from the letters of the young Keats. He reads Milton. He learns Latin and begins to read Latin verse. He attempts Greek. Suddenly, at seventy, he is satisfied only with reading Homer, Sophocles, in the ‘original’, this poet whose strength in writing has been his technical skill, his powers of observation, and not his originality. In the young Keats he has found, nevertheless, a companion and hero. In a year’s time, if he is alive, he will have found another hero and model, as if he were adolescent again, and he will be saying, I’m reading X in the original. Y did, you know. I’ve been reading Y’s life. Only, because Y is dead, he is unlikely to dress like Y, though if he finds a physical resemblance to him he may cultivate a beard or a special way of doing his hair, if he has hair, which reminds those who know Y or have seen photographs or daguerreotypes or artists’ likenesses of Y, to comment on the resemblance.

  I myself had once relied on Keats to instruct me how to pass my time! I drank the wine that Keats drank. I did not care for the French language because Keats thought it uglier than the conversation overheard around Babel. Yet I have never been a person of extreme suggestibility, only, as Keats described himself, one of extreme nothingness which, given the talent and the imagination, would have made me an actor. I don’t imagine that Keats and I are alone in this nothingness – it is the commonest state in its simplest form where it remains nothingness, emptiness, a container with now and again a few contents – Mr Metonymy, the container for the contents, where Mr Metonymy has no contents. The streets of the world are peopled with the Metonymy Family, the containers with few contents, living in figurative bliss, while others, desiring to change, embrace the simple genre, whatever that means, become members of the Literal Family, which survives through its centuries-long feud with the Metaphors and the Similes.

  Here I was, then, newly deafened Mr Anticlimax, feeling like one of the species of writers whom I despised – those, growing in number, who must ‘experience’ their subjects, who will dye themselves different colours so as to ‘feel’ the experience of being of different race, who will work for a year in an office, live in prison, in a cave, on a desert island, in a monastery, in order to write their ‘intimate story’ of life in these places: Third Trimester Bleeding, The Mechanics and Expectations of a Central Tumour, The Blood–Brain Barrier, Fabric Food, Catecholamines, Small Sample Problems, Multi-media Learning.

  I decided to live with my deafness for the period of my Fellowship, to be a deaf Watercress-Armstrong Fellow, with what must have appeared to be alarming disregard for my future health and the prospects of a cure which would diminish, I supposed, unless I sought help at once from a specialist. I could not explain, then or now, my laissez-faire state of mind about something on which my survival might have depended. When Dr Rumor suggested I go at once to a specialist to have tests taken, X-rays and so on, and that agonising test which is remarkably like water torture where water is poured into one’s ears until one is on the verge of fainting, I wrote on the new sheet of paper provided that I knew someone and would take care of the matter myself. These were lies. I knew no specialist in Menton. I suppose that, thirty-three years old,
not long technically out of adolescence, which for me anyway was a delayed process, I was courting disaster as surely but not so evidently as the young man who buys a motorbike and rides it at its full capacity. Yet I had never been a reckless person. Rather, I had been rather timid, bookish, cautious in my actions. It often happens, however, that with a person of my nature, the power of the crowd may suddenly pierce his perfect behaviour, and his nature is artificially inseminated with the potency of the master brute ‘crowd psychology’ or ‘adolescent psychology’.

  Whatever the explanation I accepted my deafness with a passivity which, before the age of the raging clitoris, would have been looked on as feminine!

  Although I accepted this total deafness I was not overjoyed by it. I was depressed and afraid. Once again I knew the strangeness and numbness of walking soundlessly through soundless streets and of watching the mouths of people open and shut, pout, twist, beg, as if they were fledgling birds each looking on the other for food, which they were doing; I could see them receiving and swallowing words, rejecting them at times, tasting them, relishing them, then perhaps spitting them out as if they had found the bitter stones within the sweet fruit. I became aware even as I walked home to my petite maison that I now looked hungrily on the mouths of others, and I was aware of a survival instinct in myself by which my intensity of staring awakened gradually the ability to ‘read’ the lips so that even without sound I too could taste the words. I felt afraid that I would forget the sound of words. I wanted to anchor my memory as if it were an intractable giant and I a tiny Gulliver; walk the miles and miles around its vastness, winding, securing an unbreakable bond.