by A. S. Byatt
A Child, said Culvert, was born to a Woman, and some Man was usually known to have been implicated in the seeding of that Child, though there was less certainty about which Man than many desired to have.
In the corrupt world from which we have fled, he said, this Child was then reared in a Family, made up of a Man, a Woman, and such brothers, half-brothers and female children as were gathered into that group. The social structures of the Society they had fled, to wit, monarchies, the Christian religion, places of education and so on, were all made in imitation of that Family. They were structures of authority, of persecution, of narrow loyalties, of hierarchy, of exclusive and narrow affections and privileges, all of which led to oppression, irrationality and the sense of private property and personal greed.
In their new world, in the Tower, all men would be equal and would care equally for all men. There would be no marriage, no family, and the children of the community would all be the children of every member. Thus envy and favouritism would be abolished. All suckling mothers would give milk indifferently to all suckling children; all would feed equally well or ill, and thus no one would hurt any other.
In order to achieve this, all the children in the Tower would be removed to the new Dormitories which he had had constructed in the last few weeks (even using outside hired labour so as the more rapidly to begin the new order and to abolish the Family). The new Dormitories were constructed in one wing to his own design. In them were cots and cushions, great beds and narrow beds, curtains and coverlets of all kinds of rich and bright colours, for he had observed that children required the stimulation of various colours and textures. Lights, too, he had made, that would shine all night, for he had observed that children were afraid of the dark. And in places these cast shadows, for he had observed that children liked to be frightened by grotesque shadows, and in others they did not, for some children were harmed by fear. And he had observed that some children desired to sleep in heaps like young puppies, and some were of a more solitary nature, and desired to sleep alone, and he had made ample provision for both.
“And if one child desires to heap itself with another who desires solitude, what then?” asked Turdus Cantor.
The children will learn to regulate their own society, explained Culvert. They will learn to respect each other’s desires and to offer kindnesses reciprocally. As our society becomes more harmonious, so this will become more natural to them. Grasping and bullying are products of the Family and the Establishment. These will be replaced by reasonable groups, founded on well-established desires.
He went on to education. Children, he said, would learn at their own speed, what they pleased, as they pleased. We should not impose on them early restrictive vices to deform and twist their minds, such as blind, uncomprehending repetition of verses or numbers, such as the laws of perspective or moral saws and sayings. All should be true discovery, all questions should be answered at the time when it was urgent to a child’s mind to have an answer, and not otherwise. Books they should have in plenty—their nature to be agreed by the whole community—and adults should always hold themselves in readiness to teach, both how to read and how to understand the contents. For a child, said Culvert, may want to read for fifteen hours together and then not again for a week or two, and it is my belief that those fifteen hours are worth months of forced attention.
Also, he said (remember, I summarise), it is my deep belief that we, who call ourselves adults, grown-ups, reasonable beings, have much to learn from very small children. For we perceive, if we watch attentively, that very small children are full of delighted activity and exploration which we, narrow and shunted, repress in them with smacking and pursing our lips, and threatening with vile things, with castration, with blindness, with dwarfism, with the Fires of Hell. Small children are natural beings, they explode from their mother’s wombs full of natural energies and powers which we pervert and suppress. Consider the natural propensity of little girls to raise their skirts and display their round bellies and little bottoms to men and women. Should we not stroke and admire and cherish what they so innocently offer? Consider the natural propensity of both sexes to seek the pleasures dormant in their little organs, in their soft small tails and their hidden sweet beads of flesh. Should we, as now, terrify and hurt them by howling and thundering, or should we not rather smile and play with them? If left to play in innocence, what might they not become, what might they not learn, and in turn teach us, of refinements of pleasure, of ecstasies of perception, of courtesies and reciprocities undreamed?
At this point Culvert’s discourse became visionary in its intensity, and hard for some of his more pedestrian or earth-bound companions to follow For he appeared to be advocating a new kind of school, or theatre (theatre and school, and also church, were part of each other in the forms of his thought), or ritual, even, in which the men and women would set themselves to learn by imitation from babes and sucklings, in which all would be innocently naked on the stage together, and innocently explore all flesh, mature and nubile and milky-new, all apertures, all lips, all teeth, all recesses, all flowings of milk and blood, of seed and sweat, of saliva and tears, of sibilants and labiles, for was not the babbling and lalling of our infant selves and our infant teachers a beginning of language more sweet, more full of promise, than the austere croakings and scratchings and hummings and hawings we had in our fallen state made of it. Oh, cried Culvert, to a great ecstatic sigh of most of his listeners, if we might again approximate our sensibilities to the moment of our birth and learn all afresh, as we shall forge new, freed sensual apparatus and new, unimagined powers of sympathy and pleasure, so shall we forge a new true language, a language of love and playfulness and truth without innuendo or inadequacy or lameness, a language like a sword, a language as immediate as the triumphal song of the seed from the cock, a language before shame and beyond shuffling embarrassment—a new universal speech.
He said also that he had observed that children did not evince the same disgust at the excrement of the human race as was shown by the more squeamish adults, a disgust which had led to the diminishing usefulness of the latrines in the Tower. This disgust might be a distortion of the sensibility induced by our cramped education, but it might also be natural, a natural development. He felt that the childish pleasure in dirt and mess should be set to use, and proposed to found juvenile Troops of cleaners, who should gallop in and out of the Tower with their own little handcarts and ponycarts containing tubs of the offending matter, to the sound of bugles and pipes. He had devised a uniform for these Troops—a subtle olive hessian with scarlet braid at every conceivable juncture—which he now displayed to the assembled company, who applauded courteously.
His ideas on punishment, which are germane to much of what I am to tell, although they were first propounded here, were in a state of some incoherence, and I will save discussion of them for a later point. He would like, he said, to proclaim that there should be no more punishment or chastisement anywhere in their reasonable passional world. But things were not so perfect, not yet, it was hard to see … On the whole, he said, it was better for adults never to punish children, whose little peccadilloes should be corrected by their peers, in an atmosphere of tolerance and laughter.
At this point the Lady Mavis asked if she might speak. Culvert had marked this lady as his opposer. She was tall and brown and spoke slowly: she and Fabian, her partner, for husbands there were now not, spoke often together and agreed on almost all things, as though they thought each other’s thoughts, and communicated sans language. And this state of doubleness, as though they were two trees that had grown together, was highly regarded in the old state, before the Revolution, but was now regarded with suspicion by the people of the Tower, as though she set herself up to have other ideals from them. And although many had availed themselves of the new freedoms, so that sweet orgies of four, or twelve, or twenty took place every night in the little side-chapels and minor dungeons, although more and more were putting themselves forward to act out their des
ires in the Theatre of Pain and the Theatre of Tongues, no other member had so far approached Fabian or Mavis. And these two had in the early days of escape been all smiles and friendliness; the Lady Mavis had created many gay fêtes champêtres for children and adults, with delicious breads and cakes made by her hands, with sweet lemonades, with barley water and fruit fools decorated with cherries and angelica. But now that the pleasures of most were more frenetic and fiercer, these simple feasts were almost shunned, or attracted only the very old and the very young. And on the Lady Mavis’s wide brow the shadow of a frown had replaced the wrinkling smile of welcome. One night she and Fabian had discussed, in their stony chamber, the advisability of entertaining other lovers. “It might amuse you,” the Lady Mavis had said to Fabian, who had replied, “If I closed my eyes, my dear, and imagined that pink Pastorella or creamy Chloris was in fact your own lithe brown self, with the little scars and the laughing-lines and the secret folds I know so well, I might be able to go through with it, but in truth I doubt it. And it would be a blow against freedom of desire to indulge in variety for fear of social disapproval. For such conventional prescription of behaviour is what we fled. And if we desire only each other, whom we know and trust, that too should be possible to accommodate in freedom.”
“He may make us act on his stage,” said the Lady Mavis.
“I think not,” said Fabian. “This is not a monarchy and he is not a king. All of us are to do as we please. Let those act who discover themselves by acting.”
“He will say, we do not know ourselves,” said Mavis.
“And we will demonstrate that we do,” said Fabian.
He will hate us, thought the lady, but had not the courage to speak it aloud. Fabian however, heard her thought. And his face too, bore a slight frown.
Culvert had spent time analysing the predominant passions of his people, and writing them down in a table of affinities and oppositions, linked by many little arrows and symbols of swords and crosses, cocks and bulls and open mouths. A truly harmonious world, he concluded provisionally, would need about five times as many citizens to make sure that every possible desire was present and reciprocated. Since the Tower would not accommodate these extra persons and passions, those present in fact must be made to double up, so to speak, to “try out” passions which did not come to them naturally. If a man had a desire to pick off the scabs of another, and no passionate scabbed skin could be found, someone must simulate this passion in the Theatre of Pain and perhaps even learn to feel delight in it.
He had the Lady Mavis picked out as a simple type, the female whose sole purpose was her need to give suck. She was a woman, Culvert’s diagnostic pronounced, whose whole sensuous being was concentrated in her big brown nipples and their dark aureoles, whose only delight in life was the drag of infant suction, the love-bites of toothless gums, the steady suck of tiny lips and the kneading of little fingers in her fat round flesh. Since their coming to La Tour Bruyarde she had assumed the freedom of unlacing her clothes and presenting the bursting globes of her breast at every opportunity to her infant’s mouth, without shame, which was of course desirable, for shame was abolished. A percipient reader might suppose that the Projector would designate such a person as wet nurse to the whole dormitory of infants, and consider her well placed and useful. But the truth must be told: something in Culvert was disgusted by the sight of these breasts, and of the milk dribbling from the infant lips as it gushed too plentifully forth. He felt a desire, as he saw her placidly feeding her child, to run at her with his hands, or even with a weapon, to pierce or bruise those assertive rounds, to mix hot blood with the pallid milk, to slice, to sever … He did not, as a good analyst of desires should have done, consider the whence, the wherefore and the possible satisfaction of his desire to hurt the Lady Mavis. He had not reached that stage in his development which was the deep contemplation of the natural human urge to hurt, to harm, to pierce, to open, to bruise, to stab, to strangle. No, the un-regenerate Culvert turned his attention away from his loathing of the Lady Mavis’s mammary display, and tried to be rational, to think in the interests of the community. She was not much use, this lady, in terms of reciprocated new delights, for no one appeared to desire her, perhaps because all were repelled by her insistent maternity. He thought she must learn to partake in the polymorphous and manifold pleasures of the flesh, for the good of the greater number. In his secret soul he began to devise a scenario for the transfiguration and opening of this austere lady. In the interim he replied, a little testily, that of course she might speak. And he felt a touch of nausea for he knew in advance what she would say, and how it should be countered.
So the Lady Mavis stood up, holding against her breast her little son, Florizel, and said in her milky voice that it was possible to dispute the wisdom of separating small infants from their mothers who had given birth to them. For a child’s body grows for a time inside a woman’s body, and after it is severed from the umbilical cord, it is still part of her, in that it cannot stand or walk alone for a year or more, and in that its natural economy, its bodily well-being, is dependent on the milk she provides and the care she takes to teach it skills and keep it from harm.
“I do not argue,” said the Lady Mavis, “that there is any God who designed or created us so, but I do argue for Nature, for everywhere in the natural world we see such particular bonds and such particular care. Even the female Alligator, who was once thought to be an unnatural and even cannibalistic Parent, has been observed to shelter her tiny offspring in the horrid cavern of her jaw, so that they run in for safety between her terrible teeth. And she does not indiscriminately shelter all such soft helpless amphibians, but only her own, the issue of her own eggs, which she knows and recognises.”
“And if this is so,” repeated Culvert with patient contempt, “do we not see what evils spring from this partiality, this hotbed of egotism and privilege, this nest of demanding love which holds back the adventurous child from exploring the outer world? It is not only in brute fact, but over and over in analogy, that Mothers have smothered their sleeping infants by rolling over their heavy bulks on their defenceless sleeping faces. No, let us, with a system of checks, balances, reinforcements, subtle affections, extend from each of us to all the others those thrustings and heats of ‘maternal’ affection, so that all may feel love for all, and the world expand in harmony, for none will compete for what is proffered to all, no orphan child will cry for the breast, no overindulged sprig struggle to evade the strangling maternal clasp—we shall all be one, and one will be all. All will feel enough of this mothering-passion, all, men, women, castrates and children, and none will emit or endure too much.”
And they all cried out, Culvert was in the right, nothing would be taken from Mavis’s children if they were removed from her exclusive company, but much would be given as well as what they had.
And while the company were exploring the new Dormitories, which were opened by the Lady Paeony, who cut a pink ribbon with a pair of scissors, Colonel Grim and Turdus Cantor made their way to the battlements and looked out over the plain. And the company exclaimed over the ingenious sleeping accommodation, the huge circular cushioned beds, decorated with embroideries of lambs in the fields playing sweetly with lion cubs and spotted leopards. And Colonel Grim said to Turdus Cantor, “I see a troop of horsemen approaching. Where is our watch?” And Turdus Cantor said, “Your eyes are better than mine, I see nothing. I am not sure we have a watch, for there is not always a Companion who desires to stand at the post since no one ever comes.”
And the company exclaimed over the pretty cupboards for play-things and chamberpots and clothing, all decorated with painted butterflies and smiling lizards.
And Colonel Grim said, “I see a banner with a bleeding tree. The Krebs are riding across the valley in full daylight. They do not usually travel by day. I think you should hurry down and alert Culvert and the others, for it may be they mean to attack us. For there is no way out of the valley to the north now the
bridge is cut.”
The company had no armed guard and no organised defence for the Tower, which would in fact be difficult, even for a large force, to break into, once the great gates were closed and the bridge down. But everyone bustled to and fro, like insects disturbed in a nest, and found out what swords, pistols, pitchforks, muskets, spits, carving knives and so forth could be brought to bear, as the company of the Krebs approached closer—for Colonel Grim’s clear eyes had seen well, they were indeed the Krebs, riding fast and furiously, about a hundred strong, and chanting as they came, in a language no one could interpret.
Their horses were low and ugly, with rough black hair and starting manes; they galloped close to the ground, in a cloud of dust, surprisingly fast. The faces of the riders could not be seen, for they all wore flat leather helmets, with a kind of leather prow projecting over their noses. They wore also black leather jerkins, supple and polished, matt here, glistening there, and leather breeches, also black, so the whole troupe was a moving, singing black shadow, above which sparkled a cloud of silver spear-points on black spears, like monstrous metal midges. Their shoulders were very broad, and their arms very long, but their torsos were squat and their waists narrow, and their bow legs, wrapped round the bellies of their horses, short.
The people of the Tower stood behind their battlements, brandishing their ramshackle collection of weapons, men, women, and a few children. The Lady Paeony declared it was a pity they had not had time to prepare boiling oil, and the Lady Coelia said they had precious little oil to spare, and would be hard put to it if the Krebs took it into their heads to encamp below the Tower and lay siege to it. And when the Krebs came nearer they began to blow great horns, great ramshorns, and circle around before the closed gates.
Then Culvert called down from the battlements, “Do you come here in peace?”
And a high, grinding voice, unaccustomed to the tongue of the Tower, answered thickly, “Neither in peace nor in war. We bring you a thing.”
