A Body of Water

by Beverley Farmer

‘In a ring! No, well, I don’t wear it all that often, it’s too heavy.’

  ‘Honey turned to stone.’

  ‘I love amber as clear as this. Sometimes it’s opaque like butterscotch. Like bottle glass from the sea. They harvest amber on seashores, don’t they? On the Baltic, I think I’ve read. Imagine fossicking for shells and starfish and bottle glass, and suddenly – this! What’s your star sign, anyway?’

  ‘Gemini.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Don’t say they’re compatible?’

  ‘No idea. They ought to be, though, don’t you think? They’re both mirror images, twin fish and twin boys. Swan-begotten, waterborn. They match.’

  They ought to be. Are they? They have moments of felt intimacy, but different ones, that quickly seem to have been illusions. Their conversations leave them stranded in silence. Each is a past love of the other’s. Each moves through the house, night and day. They sleep in the one bed. Alone and together they go to the beach, to the dunes. He is a painter. Of interiors? Exteriors? Where to draw the line? She serves as his model. The images of her in his mind are flat, all shape, so much like a sole or a flounder, those moon fish, that it would hardly surprise him if she had a dark underside to match the pearly belly he is labouring on. The shadow where the flesh sags down from the hipbone…He peers, brush high. His astonishment on first entering her is repeated, though more mildly, every time. Suddenly she is three-dimensional, four, yes; suddenly he finds himself engulfed, embedded in a warm and clinging soft mass moving over and under. His eyes had given him no foreknowledge of this. He is as astonished as if he had fallen into the canvas into this embrace. He could go on pushing more and more of himself in with every thrust, all of himself until he is wholly contained in her. But as if in his thrusting he had touched some giant sting in the deepest part of her, he convulses. And burns, and is paralysed. Later, chilled, he opens his eyes to detach himself carefully. She is glistening and limp in her sleep, glazed, translucent, yes, a stranded jellyfish. The hair under her arms and between her legs has a damp, mossy savour which stays on his fingers long after she goes back to her pose and he to his easel. Soon he has forgotten what it is that his fingers smell of. The sea comes into his mind. Seaweed on the sand.

  The dunes are growing fine long green hairs all over. Their skin shows through.

  The waves are the loudest sound in the room at night. Twice she slides out from under the sheet in the dark, pulls a tracksuit on over the damp mass of her body and walks to the lighthouse. Both times the tide is out and so is the moon. Restless, she walks on the sand, peering in pools in the light of the tide-lanterns (green one time, red the other) and of the turning lantern in the great helmet, Orion at its ear. The first time the water is rough, a turbulence of green froth; the next time she slips off the tracksuit and lies in one of her pools, in red-glinting water in which she can only just see herself. Silently she comes back to the room, to the bed with the man in its centre, who sighs in his sleep and turns to lie along her back with a hand on her cold thigh.

  One day while she is posing for him she says with a laugh, out of the blue, that when she is ready to go she will end her life here by wading out to sea with the tide. ‘Better to end up as sweet strong meat for fishes,’ she says. ‘Not liquify in a grave or be dry ashes.’

  ‘Or food for seagulls. Dogs loose on the beach. Feral cats. Rats.’

  ‘Not if you study the tides.’

  ‘What’s the difference, if it comes to that?’

  ‘Fish are clean. Clean beasts.’

  ‘Hmm,’ he says. And later, staring into space: ‘Well, I can’t help you with this one, love. Whatever it is. Sorry.’

  She sits and watches the fishes. They are two ripples of blood that dissolve and twine, two red whips. In the glass with them are fragments of the hot blue and wheat-brown square with its turret and loophole windows sunk in a slab of shade. The fish gasp; their films of fin flutter in hot mid-air. Their bubbles mirror that other bubble, the vase. They see hollow walls towering and encased in them a red bubble, the woman. She has a long red silk robe on; cool folds and shadows lap her whiteness, trailing loose from her arms down over her feet. She is a shape, a pearl, a vase with handles. Shutting her eyes she sees red silk.

  She reaches for a white mug of water on the table inside the room, outside the frame, but the water has gone, the darkness inside is only shadow, hot shadow. She has no recollection of drinking the water. Perhaps it evaporated in the intense heat over the space of the afternoon, or is such a thing not possible? She is not at the moment able to coerce her brain into remembering whether or not it is possible. If it is, though, wouldn’t the water in the vase also have to be no more than shadow? With the fish lying in draggled lumps on the thick glass of the bottom like the hanks of red seaweed the high tide leaves on the sand?

  A blue fish latticed with scales is curled high and dry on the outside of the mug. It has a barbed back and a twin-barbed fan-tail. A shadow of it shows on the inside, inscribed in the white porcelain.

  So as not to have to get up for a drink of water, she tells herself she is lying in sea water, in a deep pool of blue rock. Tails of red weed drift rocking around her wrists and ankles. The undersurface of the water is a mirror in which the pool is held and in it she sees that the two red fishes are fluttering at the weedy edges, each following the other and each a mirror of the other. So without turning her head she knows that the vase on the sill is empty for the time being. Empty, that is, of fishes: almost full of empty water.

  ‘Thirsty?’ He stretches, finished for now. ‘I’ll make the tea.’

  Sometimes he comes to the beach with her and they swim around each other among the honey-coloured rocks in shallow water flecked with weed on the surface or on the bottom. Wherever he has gone to paint he swims as well, diving in, pounding through the waves until he has cooled off. She lies in pools and dries off in the sun, moving up and down the beach with the tide.

  ‘There was a Matisse book in the local library,’ he says one evening at a restaurant with a mirror wall facing east over the sea. ‘I had a look. It’s got your picture in it, but called Interior with Goldfish.’

  ‘Not ‘Vase’? Oh well, yes. Different translators. And the vase being their interior as well makes it a double interior. That’s nice.’

  ‘He did a whole series of goldfish paintings. There was a Moroccan one with three fishes, and a Woman and Goldfish with four, yellow ones. He was in Nice in 1914 but he came back for the winter to 19 Quai St-Michel and there he painted…’

  ‘He painted it in winter! Then he had summer in mind. Quai St-Michel, did you say? On the Seine? The arch is a bridge, then! No, it can’t be, it’s not wide enough. But then –’

  ‘That would be the span that crosses to the Ile de la Cité.’

  ‘Oh, then the arch is the Pont Neuf? No. It can’t be.’

  ‘Pont St-Michel?’

  ‘If you could see your smirk! Okay, then, what’s the building?’

  ‘With the morning sun on it?’

  ‘Afternoon –’

  ‘Whatever. I don’t know for sure. I wish I could remember. The Palais de Justice is over there, and Notre-Dame, but facing the other way. So it has to be the Louvre. Over on the Right Bank.’

  ‘I see. You wish you could remember!’

  ‘I can’t, sad to say. I consulted the Blue Guide.’

  ‘The Blue Guide!’ She stares. ‘You went to all that trouble!’

  ‘No, no trouble, it was a pleasure. It brought Paris back.’

  ‘I see. So, now we know. This was a certain room, in Paris, in the winter of 1914.’

  ‘It was that roof, that steep, slate roof that –’

  ‘Oh, stop it, will you.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You and your Blue Guide!’

  ‘Guide bleu. Guide d’azur. What’s got into you?’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing. Now if I ever go to Paris again I can make my little pilgrimage to the Quai St-Michel, can’t I? A
rmed with my Guide bleu. And go and see the original at the Pompidou Centre – right? Though the original, don’t forget, is much larger and for all we know its colours are different. So often with prints…My print is still a window in summer on the Côte d’Azur. It’s an interior of the mind –’

  ‘Complete with goldfish –’

  ‘Where it’s as hot as here. And close to the sea. That blue in the air: clearly it comes from water –’

  ‘The Seine –’

  ‘And its light is the same as in the vase. It’s a submerged room.’

  The window and the mirror brim over with water. There is a haze of pink over the town on the hill, its black roofs and trees and lighthouse, and over the water. From behind it rises a faint pink balloon turning small, cold and sharp in mid-air.

  The tide is going out when they walk round under the cliff to the lighthouse on the point. Its red glass panels and the dark clear ones that face out to sea enclose a lantern like a gold beehive, a Chinese paper lantern staining the ceiling with a light no brighter than the lamps in houses. Dark shapes wander on the walls inside. The sky is red-gold. Beyond the last rim of the rock pools a ship low in the water carries its girdle of lights away, its red smokestack like a candle burning.

  In the morning she wakes knowing before she sees that all his things are gone. She thinks there is no message left for her this time, no small painting to keep. But there is one of each. On the table he has scribbled on the back of an envelope:

  A thick gloom fell through the sunshine and darken’d me,

  Must I change my triumphant songs? said I to myself,

  Must I indeed learn to chant the cold dirges of the baffled?

  And sullen hymns of defeat?

  Walt Whitman

  And on the Matisse, one of the red fishes has been perfectly painted out. She peers: yes, perfectly. Not on the glass, on the print. The other fish hangs ringed in its glass and reflected there it glimpses fragments of red-gold, an apparition, a sufficient self.

  JULY

  AT LAST THE GARDEN SHOP had the Black Genoa I ordered, a slender pipe of tree-flesh with brown roots clasping on air – could it live with no earth like that? They said it was alive but dormant. Asleep. I planted it today at the kitchen window, where it will give shade in summer and ah! rich red figs and fig cakes and jam and jelly in autumn. I hope it grows roof-tall (it’s waist-high, no, hip-high to me now) and spreads out like J’s old fig by the white verandah. The sacrament of planting a tree. This is the first fruit tree I – I alone – have ever planted in my life! But that wasn’t the reason that I felt, there on my knees, that I was making an offering in the mud that I had opened for its roots and was now patting flat above them: saying, Accept this food, accept this place, wake up and grow… When can I know? Spring. Then wait.

  Sybylla Press have accepted the little fig poem I offered as a filler (which sounds as if they were making a layer cake) for their book of erotica.

  FIGS

  A bubble of milk

  will ooze out of the taut stem

  when you pick a fig –

  don’t drink, the milk tastes bitter

  though it looks like a man’s juice.

  When ripe to bursting

  figs pass a drop of syrup

  that glows at their pink

  puckered holes. Put your mouth there.

  Open the red seed-bellies.

  A letter came from T in New South Wales:

  A few days after I received your letter Marjorie died. She had said, a week before, ‘I’m tired to death…’ What can I say – a ripe persimmon on her coffin, floral tributes, words and more words of sadness and loss, love and respect bouncing from the cool marble walls of the chapel…

  She has been given Marjorie’s old winter coat to wear, ‘green with regular flecks of grey’; and writes of having been back a couple of times to visit Vera, who showed her a coral and shell necklace that Jean Devanny had made for Marjorie.

  Letters (Pasternak to Tsvetayeva, about a mutual acquaintance):

  She read some of her prose to me and I praised it whenever possible. She is not without talent but I told her that the value of a writer and what he writes is determined by a third dimension – depth; it is this that raises the text in a vertical line off the page, and, most important, separates the book from the author…

  The groan is the loudest note in the universe. I am inclined to believe that outer space is filled with this sound rather than with the music of the spheres. I hear it, I cannot reproduce it, nor can I imagine myself caught up in its rushing, multitudinous unity, but I do make my contribution to the elemental groan.

  I always believed that in my own efforts, in all of my work, I did nothing but translate or write variations on [Rilke’s] themes, adding nothing to his world, always sailing in his waters.

  Compare Rilke, describing in letters the writing of The Sonnets to Orpheus (from the Introduction of Stephen Mitchell’s translation):

  On February 2, he disappeared into the god. It was ‘a hurricane in the spirit’. For days and nights at a time he stayed in his upstairs room, pacing back and forth, ‘howling unbelievably vast commands and receiving signals from cosmic space and booming out to them my immense salvos of welcome.’

  The lighthouse foghorn, and the ship’s response. And the whole house humming as the ship passed. The elemental groan. And in Peter Handke’s Across: ‘With great groaning wings a swan, white in the darkness, flew over the mountain.’ An Australian swan, a black swan, would have been an invisible groan on the air. (Long black swans, and a black lighthouse.)

  I was thirty before I saw white swans, when we were living in Oxford for two months of the spring of 1971. (March, April, and a great old tree in full pink blossom at St Martin’s-in-the-North, across the road in the full first sun and in sight of the doorway of the Wimpy Bar: we were all ex-colonials who worked there, two Jamaicans, a South African, an Indian girl named Krishna, who washed up, and an Australian. When Cassius Clay lost to Joe Frazier, the Jamaican cook took the day off to mourn. ‘Clay lost,’ he gasped, slumping in next day.) I got up at dawn to go to work, I crept creak by creak down the musty narrow steps at Cave Street so as not to wake the Azizes, kneeling then for as long as I could spare under the icy arch of Magdalen Bridge to throw bread through the mist on the river and make the swans sail close enough to photograph.

  Maybe I had already seen white swans in the Zoo here, but if so they would have been hypothetical, less than real, like ones made to seem familiar by films: just samples of what a white swan must be like. The Melbourne Zoo has a snow leopard! or the ghost of one – or everything but the ghost of one. And have I ever seen it? Not that I remember…Peter Matthiessen, in the Himalayas (first in The Snow Leopard and again in Nine-Headed Dragon River):

  Butter tea and wind pictures, the Crystal Mountain, and blue sheep dancing on the snow – it’s quite enough!

  Have you seen the snow leopard?

  No! Isn’t that wonderful?

  And then, in Nine-Headed Dragon River,

  Like the round-bottomed Bodhidharma doll, returning to its center, meditation represents the foundation of the universe to which all returns, as in the stillness of the dead of night, the stillness between tides and winds, the stillness of the instant before Creation. In this ‘void,’ this dynamic state of rest, without impediments, lies ultimate reality, and here one’s own true nature is reborn, in a return from what Buddhists speak of as ‘great death.’

  (Rilke’s Eurydice: She was pregnant with her own great death.)

  The earth twitches and the mountains shimmer, as if all molecules had been set free. Perhaps what I hear is the ‘music of the spheres,’ what Hindus call the breathing of the Creator and astrophysicists the ‘sighing’ of the sun.

  Also, quoting Dogen:

  The whole moon and the whole sky are reflected

  in a dew-drop in the grass, in one drop of water.

  And:

  To what may this world be lik
ened?

  Moonlight is a dewdrop

  Falling from a duck’s beak.

  Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid:

  The Buddhist allegory of ‘Indra’s Net’ tells of an endless net of threads throughout the universe, the horizontal threads running through space, the vertical ones through time. At every crossing of threads is an individual, and every individual is a crystal bead. The great light of ‘Absolute Being’ illuminates and penetrates every crystal bead; moreover, every crystal bead reflects not only the light from every other crystal in the net – but also every reflection of every reflection throughout the universe.

  In Walt Whitman’s ‘A Noiseless, Patient Spider’:

  It launched forth filament, filament, lament, out of itself,

  Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

  And you O my soul where you stand,

  Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,

  Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them…

  This story about a death in winter will be centred on the bare fig tree: ‘Black Genoa’.

  Osip Mandelstam: From Selected Poems:

  When my string’s tuned tight as Igor’s Song,

  when I get my breath back, you can hear

  in my voice the earth, my last weapon,

  the dry dampness of acres of black earth.

  And:

  Mounds of human heads are wandering into the distance.

  I dwindle among them. Nobody sees me. But in books

  much loved, and in children’s games I shall rise

  from the dead to say the sun is shining.

  Horror of the one – in Marguerite Duras’s La Douleur, Robert L is brought back from Dachau, his heart swollen ‘in the cave of his emaciation’ and trembling rather than beating; his skin ‘like cigarette paper’. And weeks into his recovery, still: ‘When the sun shines you can see through his hands.’ Horror of the many – Terrence Des Pres’ The Survivor. Drownings in the pits of excrement at Auschwitz; babies pitched into fires. The suffering, terror and degradation make it hard to take in his message of hope, or rather of hope against hope (he quotes Nadezhda Mandelstam) that human beings reduced to the bare flesh in a world of irrational horror still have an urge, a biological urge, to cohere and promote each other’s survival. That’s what he’s saying, and the evidence of the survivors is irrefutable. And an urge to live on and bear witness is part of this urge: the scream of the survivors, latent in their accounts of what was done, is like the warning screams of all social animals, as involuntary as that, he says: