Adventures in the Skin Trade

by Dylan Thomas

  Breed, cardboard on cardboard, he had cried, before I blow down your paste huts with one bellow out of my lungs. When Mary came, there was nothing between the changing of the days but the divinity he had built around her. His child killed Mary in her womb. He felt his body turn to vapour, and men who had been light as air walked, metal-hooved, through and beyond him.

  He started to cry, Rhianon, Rhianon, someone has upped and kicked me in the side. Drip, drip, goes my blood in me. Rhianon, he cried.

  She hurried upstairs, and time and time over again wiped away the tears from his cheeks with the sleeve of her dress.

  He lay still as the morning matured and grew up into a noble noon. Rhianon passed in and out, her dress, he smelt as she bent over him, smelling of clover and milk. With a new surprise he followed her cool movements around the room, the sweep of her hands as she brushed the dead Mary in her frame. With such surprise, he thought, do the dead follow the movements of the quick, seeing the bloom under the living skin. She would be singing as she moved from mantelpiece to window, putting things right, or should be humming like a bee about her work. But if she had spoken, or laughed, or struck her nails against the thin metal of the candlesticks, drawing forth a bell-note, or if the room had been suddenly crowded with the noises of birds, he would have wept again. It pleased him to look upon the unmoving waves of the bedclothes, and think himself an island set somewhere in the south sea. Upon this island of rich and miraculous plants, the seeds grown fruits hung from the trees and, smaller than apples, dropped with the pacific winds onto the ground to lie there and be the harbourers of the summer slugs.

  And thinking of the island set somewhere in the south caverns, he thought of water and longed for water. Rhianon’s dress, rustling about her, made the soft noise of water. He called her over to him and touched the bosom of her dress, feeling the water on his hands. Water, he told her, and told her how, as a boy, he had lain on the rocks, his fingers tracing cool shapes on the surfaces of the pools. She brought him water in a glass, and held the glass up level with his eyes so that he could see the room through a wall of water. He did not drink, and she set the glass aside. He imagined the coolness under the sea. Now, on a summer day soon after noon, he wished again for water to close utterly around him, to be no island set above the water but a green place under, staring around a dizzy cavern. He thought of some cool words, and made a line about an olive-tree that grew under a lake. But the tree was a tree of words, and the lake rhymed with another word.

  Sit and read to me, Rhianon.

  After you have eaten, she said, and brought him food.

  He could not think that she had gone down into the kitchen and, with her own hands, prepared his meal. She had gone and had returned with food, as simply as a maiden out of the Old Testament. Her name meant nothing. It was a cool sound. She had a strange name out of the Bible. Such a woman had washed the body after it had been taken off the tree, with cool and competent fingers that touched on the holes like ten blessings. He could cry out to her, Put a sweet herb under my arm. With your spittle make me fragrant.

  What shall I read you? she asked when at last she sat by his side.

  He shook his head, not caring what she read so long as he could hear her speak and think of nothing but the inflections of her voice.

  Ah! gentle may I lay me down, and gentle rest my head,

  And gentle sleep the sleep of death, and gentle hear the voice

  Of Him that walketh in the garden in the evening time.

  She read on until the Worm sat on the Lily’s leaf.

  Death lay over the limbs again, and he closed his eyes.

  There was no ease from pain nor from the figures of death that went about their familiar business even in the darkness of the heavy lids.

  Shall I kiss you awake? said Callaghan. His hand was cold on Peter’s hand.

  And all the lepers kissed, said Peter, and fell to wondering what he had meant.

  Rhianon saw that he was no longer listening to her, and went on tiptoes away.

  Callaghan, left alone, leant over the bed and spread the soft ends of his fingers on Peter’s eyes. Now it is night, he said. Where shall we go tonight?

  Peter opened his eyes again, saw the spreading fingers and the candles glowing like the heads of poppies. A fear and a blessing were on the room.

  The candles must not be blown out, he thought. There must be light, light, light. Wick and wax must never be low. All day and all night the three candles, like three girls, must blush over my bed. These three girls must shelter me.

  The first flame danced and then went out. Over the second and the third flame Callaghan pursed his grey mouth. The room was dark. Where shall we go tonight? he said, but waited for no answer, pulling the sheets back from the bed and lifting Peter in his arms. His coat was damp and sweet on Peter’s face.

  Oh, Callaghan, Callaghan, said Peter with his mouth pressed on the black cloth. He felt the movements of Callaghan’s body, the tense, the relaxing mustles, the curving of the shoulders, the impact of the feet on the racing earth. A wind from under the clay and the limes of the earth swept up to his hidden face. Only when the boughs of trees scraped on his back did he know that he was naked. So that he might not cry aloud, he shut his lips firmly together over a damp fold of flesh. Callaghan, too, was naked as a baby.

  Are we naked? We have our bones and our organs, our skin and our flesh. There is a ribbon of blood tied in your hair. Do not be frightened. You have a cloth of veins around your thighs. The world charged past them, the wind dropped to nothing, blowing the fruits of battle under the moon. Peter heard the songs of birds, but no such songs as he had heard the birds, on his bedroom sill, fetch out of their throats. The birds were blind.

  Are they blind? said Callaghan. They have worlds in their eyes. There is white and black in their whistling. Do not be frightened. There are bright eyes under the shells of their eggs.

  He came suddenly to a stop, Peter light as a feather in his arms, and set him gently down on a green globe of soil. Below there was a valley journeying far away with its burden of lame trees and grass into the distance where the moon hung on a navel-string from the dark. From the woods on either side came the sharp cracks of guns and the pheasants falling like a rain. But soon the night was silent, softening the triggers of the fallen twigs that had snapped out under Callaghan’s feet.

  Peter, conscious of his sick heart, put a hand to his side but felt none of the protecting flesh. The tips of his fingers tingled around the driving blood, but the veins were invisible. He was dead. Now he knew he was dead. The ghost of Peter, wound invisible about the ghost of the blood, stood on his globe and wondered at the corrupting night.

  What is this valley? said Peter’s voice.

  The Jarvis valley, said Callaghan. Callaghan, too, was dead. Not a bone or a hair stood up under the steadily falling frost.

  This is no Jarvis valley.

  This is the naked valley.

  The moon, doubling and redoubling the strength of her beams, lit up the barks and the roots and the branches of the Jarvis trees, the busy lice in the wood, the shapes of the stones and the black ants travelling under them, the pebbles in the streams, the secret grass, the untiring death-worms under the blades. From their holes in the flanks of the hills came the rats and weasels, hairs white in the moon, breeding and struggling as they rushed downward to set their teeth in the cattle’s throats. No sooner did the cattle fall sucked onto the earth and the weasels race away, than all the flies, rising from the dung of the fields, came up like a fog and settled on the sides. There from the stripped valley rose the smell of death, widening the mountainous nostrils on the face of the moon. Now the sheep fell and the flies were at them. The rats and the weasels, fighting over the flesh, dropped one by one with a wound for the sheep’s fleas staring out of their hair. It was to Peter but a little time before the dead, picked to the symmetrical bone, were huddled in under the soil by the wind that blew louder and harder as the fat flies dropped ont
o the grass. Now the worm and the death-beetle undid the fibres of the animal bones, worked at them brightly and minutely, and the weeds through the sockets and the flowers on the vanished breasts sprouted up with the colours of the dead life fresh on their leaves. And the blood that had flowed flowed over the ground, strengthening the blades of grass, fulfilling the wind-planted seeds in its course, into the mouth of the spring. Suddenly all the streams were red with blood, a score of winding veins all over the twenty fields, thick with their clotted pebbles.

  Peter, in his ghost, cried out with joy. There was life in the naked valley, life in his nakedness. He saw the streams and the beating water, how the flowers shot out of the dead, and the blades and roots were doubled in their power under the stride of the spilt blood.

  And the streams stopped. Dust of the dead blew over the spring, and the mouth was choked. Dust lay over the waters like a dark ice. Light, that had been all-eyed and moving, froze in the beams of the moon.

  Life in this nakedness, mocked Callaghan at his side, and Peter knew that he was pointing, with the ghost of a finger, down onto the dead streams. But as he spoke, and the shape that Peter’s heart had taken in the time of the tangible flesh was aware of the knocks of terror, a life burst out of the pebbles like the thousand lives, wrapped in a boy’s body, out of the womb. The streams again went on their way, and the light of the moon, in a new splendour, shone on the valley and magnified the shadows of the valley and pulled the moles and the badgers out of their winter into the deathless midnight season of the world.

  Light breaks over the hill, said Callaghan, and lifted the invisible Peter in his arms. Dawn, indeed, was breaking far over the Jarvis wilderness still naked under the descending moon.

  As Callaghan raced along the rim of the hills and into the woods and over an exultant country where the trees raced with him, Peter cried out joyfully.

  He heard Callaghan’s laughter like a rattle of thunder that the wind took up and doubled. There was a shouting in the wind, a commotion under the surface of the earth. Now under the roots and now on the tops of the wild trees, he and his stranger were racing against the cock. Over and under the falling fences of the light they climbed and shouted.

  Listen to the cock, cried Peter, and the sheets of the bed rolled up to his chin.

  A man with a brush had drawn a red rib down the east The ghost of a circle around the circle of the moon spun through a cloud. He passed his tongue over his lips that had miraculously clothed themselves with skin and flesh. In his mouth was a strange taste, as if last night, three hundred nights ago, he had squeezed the head of a poppy and drunk and slept. There was the old rumour of Callaghan down his brain. From dawn to dark he had talked of death, had seen a moth caught in the candle, had heard the laughter that could not have been his ring in his ears. The cock cried again, and a bird whistled like a scythe through wheat.

  Rhianon, with a sweet, naked throat, stepped into the room.

  Rhianon, he said, hold my hand, Rhianon.

  She did not hear him, but stood over his bed and fixed him with an unbreakable sorrow.

  Hold my hand, he said. And then: Why are you putting the sheet over my face?

  THE LEMON

  Early one morning, under the arc of a lamp, carefully, silently, in smock and rubber gloves, old Doctor Manza grafted a cat’s head on to a chicken’s trunk. The cat-headed creature, in a house of glass, swayed on its legs; though it stared through the slits of its eyes, it saw nothing; there was the flutter of a strange pulse under its fur and feathers, and, lifting its foot to the right of the glass wall, it rocked again to the left. Change the sex of a dog: it cries like a bitch in a high heat, and sniffs, bewildered, over the blind litter. Such a strange dog, with a grafted ovary, howled in its cage. Old Doctor Manza put his ear to the glass, hoping for a new sound. The sun blew in through the laboratory windows, and the light of the wind was the colour of the sun. With music in his ears, old Doctor Manza moved along the phials and the bottles of his life; the mutilated were silent; the new born in the rabbits’ cages drew down the hygienic air delightedly into their lungs. Tomorrow there were to be mastoids for the weasel by the window, but today it leapt in the sun.

  The hill was as big as a mountain, and the house swelled like a hill on the topmost peak. Holding too many rooms, the house had a room for the wild owls, and a cellar for the vermin that multiplied on clean straw and grew fat as rabbits. The people in the house moved like too many ghosts among the white sheeted tables, met face to face in the corridors and covered their eyes for fear of a new stranger, or suddenly crowded together in the central hall, questioning one another as to the names of the new born. One by one the faces vanished, but there was always one to take their place, a woman with a child at her breast, or a blind man from the world. All had possession of the keys of the house. There was one boy among them who had the name of the house, and, son of the house that was called a hill, he played with the shadows in the corridors and slept at night in a high room shuttered from the stars. But the people of the house slept in sight of the moon; they heard the gulls from the sea, the noise of the waves, when the wind blew from the south, breaking on sand, and slept with their eyes open.

  Doctor Manza woke up with the birds, seeing the sun rise each morning in a coloured water, and the day, like the growths in his jars, grow brighter and stronger as the growing hours let the rain or the shine and the particles of winter light fall from them. As was his custom, he turned, this one morning, from the window where the weasel leapt, to the life behind glass; he marked with an unmortal calm, with the never-ended beginning of a smile no mother bared with the mouth of her milk, how the young lapped at their mothers and his creatures, and the newly hatched fluttered, and the papped birds opened their beaks. He was God, he was power and the clay knife, he was the sound and the substance, for he made a hand of glass, a hand with a vein, and sewed it upon the flesh, and it straightened with the days and the heat of the false light, and the glass nails grew long; and who but God could trim his nails with the edge of a diamond? Life ran from his fingers, in the hues of his acids, on the surface of the boiling herbs; he had death in a thousand powders; he had frozen a crucifix of steam; all the great chemistries of the earth, the mystery of matter—See, he said aloud, A brand on a frog’s forehead where there was neither—in his room at the top of the house had no mystery.

  The house was one mystery. Everything happens in a blaze of light; the groping of the boy’s blind hands along the walls of the corridor was a movement of light, though the last candle dimmed by the head of the stairs, and the lines of light at the feet of the locked doors were suddenly taken away. Nant, the boy, was not alone; he heard a frock rustle, a hand beneath his own scrape on the distemper. Whose hand? he said softly. Then, flying in a panic down the dark carpets, he cried more loudly, Never answer me. Your hand, said the dark, and Nant stopped still.

  Death was too long for the Doctor, and eternity took too much time.

  I was that boy in a dream, and I stood stock still, knowing myself to be alone, knowing that the voice was mine, and the dark not the death of the sun but the dark light thrown back by the walls of the windowless corridor, I put out my arm, and it turned into a tree.

  Early, that one morning, under the arc of a lamp, old Doctor Manza made a new acid, turning it round and round with a spoon, seeing it have colour in its beaker and then, by a change of heat, be the colour of water. It was the strongest acid, burning the air, but it lapped around his fingers sweet as a syrup and did not burn at all. Carefully, silently he raised the beaker and opened the door of a cage. This was a new milk for the cat. He poured the acid into a saucer, and the cat-headed creature slipped down to drink. I was that cat-head in a dream; I drank the acid, and I slept: I woke up in death, but there I forgot the dream and moved on a different being in the image of the boy who was terrified of the dark. And, my arm no longer the branch of a tree, like a mole I hurried from light and to the light; for one blind moment I was a mole, with a ch
ild’s hands, digging, up or down, I knew not which, in the Welsh earth. I knew that I was dreaming, but suddenly I awoke to the real, hard lack of light in the corridors of the house. There was nobody to guide me; Doctor Manza, the foreigner in a white coat making a new logic in his tower of birds, was my only friend. Nant raced for the doctor’s tower. Up a spiral stairs and a broken ladder, seeing, by candle, a sign that said To London and the Sun, he climbed in my image, I in his, and we were two brothers climbing for the Doctor’s tower. The key was on a chain ringed from my waist. Opening the door, I found the Doctor as I always found him, staring through the walls of a glass cage. He smiled but paid no heed to me who had lusted a hundred seconds for his smile and his white coat. I gave it my acid and it died, old Doctor Manza said. And, after ten minutes, the dead hen rose to its feet; it rubbed against glass like a cat, and I saw its cat’s head. This was ten minutes’ death.

  A storm came up, black bodied, from the sea, bringing rain and twelve winds to drive the hill birds off the face of the sky; the storm, the black man, the whistler from the sea bottom and the fringes of the fish stones, the thunder, the lightning, the mighty pebbles, these came up; as a sickness, and afterbirth, coming up from the belly of weathers; the antichrist from a sea flame or a steam crucifix, coming up the putting on of rain; as the acid was stronger, the multiplying storm, the colour of temper, the whole, the unholy, rock handed, came up coming up.

  This was the exterior world.

  And the shadows, that were web and cloven footed in the house, with the beaks of birds, the shifted shadows that bore a woman in each hand, had no casting substances; and the foam horses of the exterior sea climbed like foxes on the hills. This that held Nant and Manza, the bone of a horse head, the ox and black man arising from the clay picture, was the interior world. This was the interior world where the acid grew stronger, and the death in the acid added ten days to the dead time.