Babel Tower

by A. S. Byatt

  “Daniel. I know. Don’t hurt yourself.”

  “There’s more. Then I felt—I were dangerous to them—Will and Mary. That I could do them no good, that they’d got to be got away from what were happening to me—for their own good—I really thought that—”

  “It may have been true.”

  “Yes, but now. But now. Now there’s Marcus—looking like—like an ordinary being, laughing with that girl, Jacqueline—and here’s me—with my son hating me—how can I tell you? The world’s changed, and Will and Mary have changed—disaster is my job, Winifred, I know what—the living look like, as opposed to the walking dead. They’re the living.”

  “And you’re the walking dead.”

  “That’s it. I’m not. Not exactly. Only some of the time. Only really. Hell. I can do what the living do, I can eat my breakfast, I can think how lovely Mary looks, eating hers, I can find Bill funny, going on about Frederica, I can smile—I’ve got out of that—that clear black state—you see the world through a veil of coal, you know—”

  “I know.”

  “And now I don’t. How can I go back to what I do in London and leave Mary, when she were so nearly dead, and I wasn’t there? How can I let Will hate me so? I can tell you—it’s still truer that I’m the walking dead than that I’m so to speak resurrected. I love the smell of your toast, but it’s only because I remember it, not because I notice it. You know? I don’t know if you know. I think almost all human beings walk about over the crust of some pit they know is yawning for them—almost everyone has things they’d rather not see in their mind’s eye—daren’t let their thoughts start up—I’m no different from anyone.”

  “You’re different because you say it. Because you see it in other people. Because you look at it, and work with it, instead of sidling away or looking in another direction. Those people in London need someone. There aren’t many around like you. You can’t be all things to all men.”

  Every morning the company in La Tour Bruyarde were awoken by delightful sounds of pipes and cymbals and fresh young voices. The Lady Paeony had formed the children into an enthusiastic choir, who sang their aubades in corridors and courtyards. No one was irritated by these dulcet sounds, which were most carefully kept sweet and low, so that pillowed heads only turned and lifted to hear more clearly. The assembled company broke their fast together in the Great Hall, and were served with bread freshly baked in the great ovens of the castle, with honey, and currant jellies, and little dishes of clotted cream and jugs of foaming milk from the cows who grazed on the grassy slopes below the fortress. The Lady Roseace had discovered the cowsheds, where the heavy gentle beasts were milked, and the dairy, where their milk was churned and sieved and skimmed and whipped, quite by accident, as she daily discovered new regions of their sequestered realm. She had cried out with delight upon entering the dairy thus unawares, and indeed from a rather dank and mouldering passage, which she had believed to be a shortcut to the latrines. It was a place of order and beauty, cool and glimmering, with earthenware tiles on its floor, and many varieties of tiles on its walls and working surfaces, tiles darkly green and richest lapis-blue, tiles sprigged with forget-me-nots, and decorated with blue milkmaids on white glaze, with windmills and weathercocks and other innocent country creatures. A large young woman with round red forearms was patting butter, and another was pouring a great flood of sweet, warm, foaming milk into an earthenware pancheon. The Lady Roseace had wandered delightedly round this quiet place, touching cool surfaces, tasting cheeses with a pink finger, and had finally walked from the dairy down a flagged passage into a byre where a young man and a young woman were milking two creamy-golden cows, in that smell of straw and mild piss and animal heat which is unforgettable as rose gardens. She watched entranced as the ten fingers pressed and coaxed and squeezed and tickled and stripped, and the two large udders softly shuddered and contracted under the finger-tips, and the teats sprang and started, and the white liquid spurted and hissed into the pails. The young man’s face was pressed into the hairy groin of the cow, and both were softly beaded with sweat.

  The Lady Roseace thought no employment could be more delightful, and said as much to Culvert, when he came into her rosy boudoir that morning, as he always came, to discuss the day’s doings. She asked him who the delicious people were who inhabited the dairy and the byre, and he replied that they were the dairymaids and the cowman, those who had always had charge of those places. Inspired by the idea of the skimmer, and the butter-pats, and perhaps also by the memory of the warm, fragrant flank of the cow, the Lady Roseace said that this was a trade she would like to learn, and that it was their intention, was it not, to abolish the status of servants and masters, so that ideally there should surely be no dairymaid and no cowman?

  Indeed, that was so, replied Culvert, and no one was more conscious of the urgent need to proceed with that project than he himself. Indeed, since their arrival in the Tower, he had busied himself with the writing of a Memorandum which should form the basis for a discussion of the best way to set about the division of labour in the community and in the economic circumstances in which they found themselves. And he had found, he went on, abstractedly inserting his hand in its customary place between Roseace’s full breasts, and playing elegantly with her right nipple, that the consideration of the division of labour had entailed the consideration of all sorts of diverse other things, such as the system of education that might prove most fruitful, and ideas about desirable modes of dress, and new forms of language. His brain was in a turmoil, protested Culvert, transferring his delicate fingering to the left nipple and leaving the right one straining upright. The Lady Roseace stared dreamily out of the window, and shuddered agreeably, and said again that she would like to work in the dairy, she was very attracted to the idea of the dairy. She said also, as she sank dreamily to her knees on the goatskin rugs, and felt Culvert parting her moist thighs with his hard hand, that perhaps he should discuss division of labour with the whole company before his complex Memorandum was entirely complete. Otherwise they might think, she said, her voice frilling and shivering with bliss as he opened her lower lips, that he believed himself to be the master and architect, and not only one of a free and equal society, as they had agreed, she said, getting out the word “agreed” before a long wordless moan of bliss overtook it.

  Culvert addressed the assembled company in the place he called sometimes the Theatre of Tongues and sometimes, though less often, simply the Theatre of Speech. There were other theatres, as we shall see, the Theatre of Mime, for instance, the Theatre also of Cruelty, in other parts of the citadel. The Theatre of Tongues had once been a chapel, like some of the other theatres, the Theatre of Sacrifice, for instance, and there were of course also other chapels in the Tower, some of them disused, some of them no more than an anchorite’s cell, some of them adapted to other purposes, garderobes maybe, or wine-stores, or places for the strict examination of souls and bodies. No count of the chapels had ever come up with exactly the same number as any other, and so it was also, with even more exorbitant margins of error, with the other rooms in that place.

  The Theatre of Tongues was so called partly at least because in the gloom of its upper vaulting could still be seen an ancient frieze depicting tongues of flame, boiling upwards like pyres or faggots and descending also like crowns. The walls were crumbling and the fresco damaged. Some believed the tongues of flame to be part of a lively depiction of hell-fire, and their case was partly borne out by the presence of a soot-black demon over the south door, brandishing eight arms, each holding a wailing infant, with his mouth, full of gnashing white fangs, ready to ingest them. But others believed that the flames were the relics of a depiction of the Pentecostal descent of the Spirit, and explained the shadowy stick-like figures barely visible beneath the tongues as the Apostles waiting in the Upper Room. They too had visual proofs, of a kind, for there was a faded frieze of bishops’ mitres that ran beneath all.

  The Theatre of Tongues was still li
t dimly by Gothic windows along its two flanking walls, but where the altar would have been a new stage had been constructed, with midnight-blue velvet curtains spangled with golden stars, and everything necessary to raise and lower stage-sets, plinths, thrones, plaster walls, and other such useful adjuncts. The seats in this building were carved, high-backed benches, pews you might have called them, if in a church, not a theatre. They were not uncomfortable but gave the company, perforce, the rigid attentive posture of a jury.

  Culvert made an entry from the rear of the stage, looking modest and dynamic, as he knew well how to look. He was beautifully dressed in green breeches and white stockings, with a simple but intricately tied cravat, and his glistening hair tied back. He spoke fluently, with wit and passion, for an hour and a half at least, reading from time to time from his unfinished Memorandum when his ideas became too intricate.

  The main matters he touched on are listed below, for the convenience of the present reader. The truly curious may find his theory of the human passions and velleities set out in exhaustive detail in Appendix A2 of the present work—though it must be stressed here that his ideas at the time of his appearance in the Theatre of Tongues were in a very early stage of their formulation, and had by no means even begun to resemble their final carbuncular multi-faceted brilliance or their intricately systematised web of correspondences and cross-referred psychopolitical acuities. Indeed at that time the genius of Culvert was only instinctively reaching towards his visionary understanding that a community of bodies and minds could be forged by the general will and the general confluence of desires into One Being acting simply for its own self-preservation and its own entire delectation. To this end he was to elaborate his understanding, his taxonomy, of the co-operal passions, great and small, of human creatures, of the ways to release their energies as flowers release sweet smells and puff out pollen, all natural as breathing and bleeding.

  These are the substantive headings of Culvert’s speech. Whilst he delivered it, the Lady Roseace, and not only she, took intense pleasure in observing the decision and flexibility of his upper lip, the energetic pulse in his white throat, the muscular swell of his buttocks in his shining breeches and, not least, as his rhetorical urgency increased, the harder and rounder pressure of his virile member in its satin casing. By the end of the speech the Lady Roseace was positively aching to touch and release him, and relieved herself in a wild frenzy of clapping.

  1 The community must strive towards complete freedom for each and every member to live and express himself—or herself—to the utmost.

  2 To this end all false distinctions of the corrupt world from which they had fled must be abolished. There must be no masters and no servants, no payment and no debt, but a common consent about the work to be done, the delights to be enjoyed, the just sharing of these, and the proper remuneration of all from the common fund of goods and talents. Professions must be abolished, along with privileges, all must turn their hands to all that was possible, as their desires led them, for work desired to be done is work well done, and slave labour is always ill done.

  3 “It will be found,” Culvert said, “I believe, upon just reflection, that many of the evil distinctions and oppressions in our world come from institutions we have not dared to question. Most of us have already questioned and rejected the religions of our forefathers and compatriots, seeing to what evils they have led, but we have not sufficiently studied how those unnatural institutions—marriage, the family, the patriarchy, the pedagogic authoritarian relation between teacher and pupil—have also harmed our natural impulses and inclinations. I believe I may be able to demonstrate how much harm has been done to female affections, as well as to male vigour, by the institution of monogamy, as I believe I may be able to show that both rationally and emotionally a child may be stunted by being left only to the attentions of its progenitors, however amiable and well-meaning.”

  He discussed also:

  4 How it might be possible to fit work to the natural inclinations of all—men, women, and children—as they varied from home to home and from age to age.

  5 How a more beautiful and less restrictive form of dress might be devised, doing away with false modesty, which in the new order would be unnecessary, and with harmful bones and laces, unless there were those—as he believed there would be found to be—who took pleasure in the constraints of such things on the flesh.

  6 How language might in the end need to be reforged and reinvented, for there were no words in the language for many of the pleasurable exercises and human relations he proposed, and such words as there were were pejorative and harsh, carrying with them associations from the old prohibitions and pruriences of priests, patriarchs, and pedagogues. “Language,” cried Culvert, throwing open the damp cavern of his mouth, with its hot quivering tongue and gleaming teeth, “language is a bodily product, a product of our earliest intimacies and desires, from the babble of the infant at the breast to the impassioned discourse of the visionary who tries to speak what is yet unformulated and unshaped. We will remake language in our own images,” cried Culvert, “with our own kissings and sippings will we make new names for what we will do and be, for the relations between ourselves, and the relations between ourselves and the world.”

  7 He proposed also that the whole community should take part in various theatrical performances from time to time, and on a regular schedule to be mutually agreed. There should be dance, mime, music, debate, choral singing, gymnastic displays, tumbling, juggling—

  “Sword swallowing and fire-breathing,” interjected a voice from the hinder pews.

  “Those too if there can be found amongst our number persons whose sensuality inclines towards the taste of cold steel, or the thrill of scorched gullets.

  “There shall also be dramatic presentations, and not only of old plays about old things, the ambitions of kings and generals, the moanings of monogamous lovers, but of new plays about new social forms, new encounters, new desires, new resolutions of new conflicts. And after the plays there shall be debates concerning the meanings and the value and the excellence and demerits of the performances, and these debates shall be no less full of energy and passion than the plays themselves.

  “Also I propose that we regularly meet for story-telling. There may be those among you who suppose story-telling to be primitive and childish, but I say that story-telling is the primal human converse, since we are the only animals who look before and after, referring to past events and wisdom, and envisaging the future in the light of these things. I propose that we tell each other, one by one, the true stories of our lives, and this with several ends in view, viz., the greater understanding and friendship this will bring about for each of the other, and equally the greater understanding these narratives will give of the true patterns of passions and desires that rule each of our lives. And when these passions and desires are in this way made manifest, the community will the more easily be able to see how these energies may be cunningly put to use for the common good and the common delight. And as the narrators become more skilled and trusting, and as the listeners become more subtle in questioning and probing, so shall the stories become more and more truthful, as hidden things, shameful secrets, desires suppressed with violence in the harsh old days, are brought out into a clear and reasonable, friendly, and accepting light and warmth. For it is also my belief that what is kept secret and separate festers in body and brain, to the detriment of the individual and the community. Sunlight cures suppurating diseases of the skin, and friendly contemplation may cure many boils and carbuncles on the psyche.

  “Later we may even wish to enact these stories together, to enact them even with beneficent and healing differences, restoring losses, fulfilling desperate needs, who knows? I should hope that the tale-telling may become the central, the sacramental activity, so to speak, of our union.

  “But these are only thoughts, and only my thoughts. We must all think long and deeply as to how to proceed, and skilfully and quickly about the i
mmediately pressing problems.”

  Not only the Lady Roseace, but all the assembled company, including the little children and infants who could not have understood a word, applauded vigorously after this speech. Various questions were raised, in a spirit of co-operation and enthusiasm. Turdus Cantor, for instance, asked whether the proposal for autobiographical narrations—which he believed might be both instructive and amusing—did not smack in some way of the confessional practices of the old Church, and might not be, as the confessional had been, manipulated by unscrupulous men to instil fear and obedience in the weak. To which Culvert replied that that might be so in a secret confessional, as the Church’s was, but not in the frank and open and sympathetic group of loving supporters he envisaged.

  The Lady Mavis, clutching her infant Florizel to her breast, asked how soon Culvert proposed to institute communal care of the young, and whether it would be done without further thought being given to providing for all the needs of the smallest members of the community, including mother’s milk and the lalling of the maternal voice. For speaking of her own desires, she said, she felt a passionate need to feed and cradle and comfort her own infants, and so she was sure did every woman. To which Culvert replied that nothing would be done without full debate, and that her confessed proclivities seemed to suggest, prima facie, her suitability for employment in the nurseries, but that this too, would need looking into, considering also the passional needs of the infants themselves, and of other possible nurses and wetnurses.

  As for Lady Mavis’s naïve view that all women had a natural inclination to caring for infants, specifically their own infants, he had only to call on history to prove her wrong. He had only to refer to the habit of exposing unwanted infants, usually females, in jars outside the walls of civilised Athens, or the Chinese habit of regular infanticide of unwanted female young, whom they suffocated with affection, or punished too captiously.