Barbary Shore

by Norman Mailer

  “You, of course, would have been unaware of this,” he was going on, “but I watched you during the entire time, and there was one expression on your face. It was disbelief. You couldn’t accept the fact that the corporeal face and body of McLeod could ever have performed such capers. All the while you were waiting for me to deny it, I could sense that. You still don’t accept it completely. For you, there’s a magic word, and I’ve only to utter it and the explanations fall into line. And I could tell it to you, I could show you with dates and facts that I am not the Balkan gentleman as Leroy puts it in all his humor, but what would that avail? Because you see the truth is that there are deep compacts between Leroy and myself, you might almost say we are sympathetic to each other, and there was your presence and the girl’s, and who knows what she’ll babble, and then there are his artistic qualifications for the job which must not be discounted—whether it’s organizational insight or more probably an accident, I must say that from their point of view they couldn’t have chosen a better man because I can assure you that all through it, all through the fiction and fancy of all the things I was alleged to have done in Mediterranean waters, there was not a word of legal truth and all the parallel truth in the world because if it were not one act I committed it was another, and you must notice his devilish cleverness, unconscious I’m certain, for his instincts are perfect. He knew how I would react if the specifics were given. I’ve covered that over for myself these many years, oh, aware what I did, but none the less there’s a certain crutch to the name of a thing, it all seems more reasonable and possible until you put it figuratively, until the metaphorical end, which is always the muzzle if you come down to it, blasts you in the face. And all the while, the detached portion of my brain which feeds on ice water, and that’s true, was admiring him for an aesthetic performance, so that you see no matter how I suffer there’s a counterfeit touch, and even at this moment I find a basic amusement because I’m not suffering at all, I’m merely trying to suffer and with such exertion that I suffer from the effort, and that’s how cold my tit has proven.”

  He ceased talking, but the transition was only external, for he continued to pace back and forth, the latest of the continual cigarettes he smoked drooping from his mouth and laying its trail of ash beside him. In his head the words undoubtedly continued, jostling, burbling, stewing until the pot must have rattled, and from the force of the soliloquy his lips formed a soundless equivalent of what he might have said.

  With no more reason he was speaking aloud again. “Yet I ask myself if it is entirely a swindle that you should have had such confidence in me, or whether it is an indication that I have altered in these past years and could have given an impression of personal integrity and the capacity for theoretical speculation, for you’ve involved yourself on my account. May it be that the potentiality I possessed once as a revolutionary has not been completely dissipated, and there is still hope for me if only I can slough the hundred crimes upon my head, shake free once and for all, and strike out again with vigor instead of by the half-crippled steps I have employed? But, no!”—and here he struck one hand against the palm of the other—“this is rationalization, and I can be trusted to scrape the meat off the last rotten bone, looking for anything to find my out, and even enlisting you with all your poor sad dependencies to make my brief.”

  So he continued on and on, expressing at last outwardly the total of all the nights he must have lain in his bed, all nerves alive, limbs aching, while in relentless turmoil each thought birthed its opposite, each object in the darkness swelled with connotation until a chair could contain his childhood, and the warm flaccid body of Guinevere slumbering beside him expanded its bulk to become all the women he had ever known, but in their negative aspect, so that whatever pleasure he might have felt was not felt now, and he rooted in all the sweating and lurching of unfulfillment until the flesh of his wife had become just that, and as flesh was the denominator of meat and all the corpses he had ever seen and some created.

  “I’m the only one he says who ever turned back to theory, and this he delivers with a smack of the lip for he’s seen the statistics and that’s enough for him. It’s all the key he needs. But do you know what it means to turn back? It’s the one achievement of my life, yes,” he said. “Think of it, you’ve got to make the imaginative reconstruction, don’t forget you’re dedicated to the land across the sea, you’ve come to understand finally the gory unremitting task of history and the imperfect men with whom you change it, and it’s a whole choice, you tell yourself, with all the good and bad of one against all the bad and good of the other, until I can tell you it’s with a gloomy but nonetheless delicious satisfaction that you hear about some particularly unpleasant piece of work by the side you’re on because it’s a test of yourself, and you don’t shrink back. It’s hard is it, well then make it harder, burn out the pap and the syrup and make yourself harder because it takes that; it takes all of that.” He halted in the middle of the floor, looking at me expectantly with a puckering of his mouth. If there had been a glass of water in his hand, he would have swallowed it at a gulp. “And that’s only the preliminary, because soon you know that it’s all renounced for yourself, all the pleasures of the plump belly, and you’re burned out, burned out for the generations to come, and so you can only drive yourself. Cannot you understand, you crippled prig,” he shouted at my impassive face, “why we remained so long in a situation now reactionary and stoked fuel to the counter-revolution? You have no life, and so you do not know what it means to deny what has been the meaning of your life, for if you’ve been wrong, mark you now, if you’ve been wrong, then what of the decamillion of graves, and so you’re committed, you’re committed wholly, do you understand? and each action you perform can only confirm you further in your political position or what I would now call the lack of one, and there’s only the nightmare of yourself if you’re wrong, for you see it gets turned inside out and after a while the only path to absolution is to do more of the same so that you end up religious and climb to salvation on the steps of your crimes. And in all this, in all the activity and activity, do you dare lie awake and resurrect all the old tools of surplus value and accumulation and the exploitation of one class by another, or do you sink your teeth into the meat you’re permitted, no private ownership and therefore … therefore therefore … I exist, therefore I am, and so there must be socialism, except that the weirdest statements go through your head, and once I jotted it down on a piece of paper, a perfectly ridiculous remark, ‘The historical function of La Sovietica is to destroy the intellectual content of Marxism,’ except the underworld was beginning to win out in me, and how I turned on the others who deserted, and deserting were not dead for there was another exploitation they could join. Oh, none of those went back to theory as Leroy can point out with all his little numbers on the paper, and small wonder with their heads stuffed with all the fetid paraphernalia of factology and commission and how many divisions have you? The whole choice they’ve made on one rotten boat, and what can they do? they’re sailors they say, and so it’s the other stinking bark for them, and the old exploitation for the new, and in the swap Leroy comes in, and the rich old exploitation lulls them with its living standard and how they’ve forgotten that it exists at the cost of the misery of the rest of the world and a million ton of cannon.”

  But his invective could flay outward only so long before he must reverse it upon himself. “And yet. . yet what did I do myself? Did I drop out of sight with one clean break, or did I have to play out the comedy to its last unpleasant detail? Oh, I was forced to work for the others, they admitted me here in return for services rendered, but that’s small excuse, and there were times in the early months when you might say I was almost eager, for I was attempting to reverse what I had once done, and merely succeeding in doubling it, but I was charged with hate at that time, hate for the party and for the past as protection against the hate of m’self and all those wasted years. And in such a state you can imagine th
e labor it takes to see yourself for the second time clearly, and prepare your theoretical retreat, but how, with what distrust, by making it almost impossible for oneself to continue to live, by grafting the little object into my flesh, so that now I could be hunted not by one but by two, as if I had to make certain that any return was absolutely impossible. And marrying on top of that when what I wanted was isolation, and petrified in my bones that I was already dead so I must call on her to thaw me out, and I’ve never given her the time of day. Thus, notice the admirable path I have taken from the bureaucrat to the theoretician. Still such is the arrogance of my species that I resent Leroy for my judge and the fact that he makes me a smudge on the paper and is indifferent to what I have endured I find intolerable. I tell myself he’s got a policeman’s brain, and it’s only the murders he can understand, but what of the capitulations which he would undoubtedly approve? those are what torment me now if I think on the past, every time I opened my mouth and sullenly, hysterically, or even happily, depending on circumstance, I would renounce all my despicable, counter-revolutionary, depraved, degenerate, wrecking and inconsequential objections to no matter what, and so forth and so forth, there was the commitment step by step, there was the betrayal of myself as a revolutionary, and the rest, the legal crimes, merely the confirmation. It is only possible to come at last to the conclusion that Leroy is right and I should be just a cipher on the paper, and justice is justice, and it’s only the fool expects a mothers milk.

  “For I tell you”—and now his engine running without governor, he must grasp me by the shoulder, squeezing it with a desperation to match his eyes—“that I haven’t begun to plumb the rottenness of it, and it’s when I think of the other one with the ax in his gray hair, and your friend Miss Madison who’ll never be able to live past that moment, and it wasn’t the direct participation of myself in it, oh, I have no concrete blood on my hands, I was just a cog in that one and arranged a passport, and smelled a little of what was to come, but you see I did nothing and all the while I was managing my infinitesimal part of the operation, working on it while I was at the height of a crisis for it was the time of the pact, and I no longer believed a minute in what had been the external and objective reality of my life.” He had begun to mutter. “This detail taken care of and that. I could not have known who it was for, and yet I knew it was him out in Mexico, and on the dark sly I was reading his works behind my barricaded door.

  “I knew,” he shouted suddenly, “I knew. There’s the crime. No longer believing and I went ahead, I let him be murdered you see. Why did I do this? Was it out of fear, can I extract that last extenuating circumstance? Can I plead that out of mortal fear which may assail any human I was a craven, and harsh as the word may be, a drop of pity may be dispensed. No, that’s not it at all. Because I wasn’t afraid at the time. I’d nibbled at death like salt, and for years. My system was full of it. I expected it myself. No, I let him be killed because I hated him, because the thought that all through the years with all his theoretical bilge about a degenerated worker’s state, he was still nearer the truth than I had been, and my life was the lie, and the thought of him was unbearable for he had a knack to activate the tumor in all of us until it gave no rest, and I was making herculean efforts to regain conviction, and as long as he remained, he was there, you understand? I hated him, I wanted him dead as if that would prove he were wrong, and with all this stuffed as I was with the desire to quit, ready to burst.”

  But there were circles upon circles yet to be traced, and if he attacked himself, my turn was to be next. “It’s when I go through all of this and face the actions I’ve taken, and the years I’ve spent in the room right across there when you know what was tormenting me? That I was out of things. The biggest of all the obstacles I set against myself in doing my little theoretical work, the biggest of them all was that I was alone, and time was passing, and how many divisions had I? Because that’s the other part of the swindle, and if you start with a whole choice, you end with a whole office to run, and it’s not easy to give it up. You want to be treated with the bourgeois dignity befitting your position, and I can tell you it goes deep enough so that one of the things which excruciates me now is that brought to book with my hands and legs all properly tied, who do I face as prosecutor but a child, one of their youngest men, promising perhaps but you’d think they need more than that for me, you see the petty things mixed in all this, you see how I complain, and if I’m to be honest there’s a word or two to be said about yourself. What is your function in all this, and you have hardly the least idea, but I treat you as a confessor monk with the part of myself that never sloughs the Catholic, burn their black robes at their own stake, and that galls in me as well, for if I’m to have the prelate, you might suppose a cardinal would be on demand with all their techniques for such a thing, or even a pope in white and gold, but what do I get instead, a poor little friar like yourself with all your blunted flattened spirit, your lack of understanding, a castrate in short. Poor little monk from a third-rate monastery with the patches showing in your frock, and nothing left to yourself so that you can only sup for emotional wares at someone else’s table.”

  He must be all things now, sword-bearer, warrior, and doctor; no sooner did he open a wound in me then he must salve it. “The mark of my irredeemable corruption,” he cried out, “is that I turn against you when you’re the first human being who has offered me friendship in so many years that I’ve lost all aptitude for it. And it is impossible for you to know the excitement I felt that night on the bridge when I heard you talk with precision enough for me to realize that here was one of the young generation with a socialist culture, and that if my time was passing on another was coming, a new generation with new strength, and the pain it cost me to masquerade as something else, but I couldn’t reveal it to you that night, not when I didn’t know how much Leroy had found out, and that by the side, for if I speak bitterly to you, it is because you raised an expectation, and I realize now that your equipment counts for nothing, and like the others you will await the flood with despair. And if I find that intolerable, it’s due to my own itch. What after all is at the bottom, what has sent me helter-skelter across the hall to entertain you all this time with the sound of my voice, and the answer is simple enough now that I come to it. I ask,” and here he paused, stood looking at me with eyes which had become expressionless.

  “Lovett,” he said, “why shouldn’t I save myself?”

  And with an eagerness which would suffer no answer to his question, he went on before I could reply. “The more I consider, the more I’m filled with a technical admiration for Leroy, and I’ve come to decide he’s the perfection of the policeman for it’s never enough to bring the man in, you’ve got to swallow him first, and with the natural anxiety of the average human I resist his intent, but there’s no getting around it, I’m tormented by the thought, and it’s a simple one. For what? For what do I resist, and to what purpose, because you notice I’m caught in all the unspeakable discomfort of a grave contradiction. If it is possible, all past considered, to function as a man and to create work which satisfies my moral appetite, to wit contribute to the body of revolutionary theory for the future, and so resist him, then I have no choice at all. I’m a dead man. Whereas, if I capitulate again, and after all says the worm, what is one capitulation when I have contributed to a hundred? then, oh then, worked with all my skill and playing upon his cupidity, there’s a tiny passage into the clear, and what do I have for my pains, I go out alive and better off dead. So, you see, alive it’s dead, and dead I’m alive, and yet I prefer the second and a corner still kept for myself, and all the while he put me through his paces, I bled to confess, I wanted to tell him, it was with a relief you cannot know I told him I had the little [unclear] for that brought me a step further to the ultimate of conceding it privately to him, and I must tell you that I know against the voracious appetite of Mr. Hollingsworth there is only the fatigue in my own bones, and the heartlessness of no polit
ical future for any of us, and then I wonder if I have actually, if I care actually to resist him to the end. For what?”

  He paused for breath and was off again. “You see, there is something actually. What I come up with in this the irony of ironies is that I who married for many reasons and few of them good, now find that I could feel the most intense love for my wife, and would be willing to accept a nook for the few years left, indeed hunger for it with a passion that surprises me now, so like the love-torn youth I build a mountain of innuendo on which to feed if there is an exchange between us of even two pleasant words. And it’s her who has to love me, for if she does, he can have the thing he wants, and she and I’ll disappear again, and what’s one more defeat when we have lost every battle but the first? You see, Lovett, the problem”—he grasped both my wrists with his hands—“is that I can no longer approach the idea of Guinevere and myself with anything like detachment, and I’m completely adrift and cannot discern up from down nor left from right, and yet at the same time my hunger to know the truth of this situation, which is at least the shred of integrity I possess, has become immense, and I want you to come down with me, tomorrow or the day after so long as it’s soon, and listen to her and me talking, and form your conclusions from that to see if there is any promise whatsoever, or whether out of her own mixed beginnings and the race I’ve run her, there is nothing but her own limited capacity for hatred, and I am literally at zero.”