Dreams of Speaking Read online

  Among other messages was one from her mother, who had only recently acquired an internet connection. Pat’s letter read as if it had been delivered from another era: it had none of the typos, contractions and poor punctuation of e-mail, but was thoughtful, measured and composed with care. ‘Dear Alice, how are you? I hope you are well.’ Alice remembered being taught in primary school that a letter should begin in this way. It was touching, this sentimental holding to form. Her mother wrote that Fred needed another hernia operation, but was otherwise cheerful and still preoccupied with his garden. She said nothing of Norah, or Michael, but mentioned that she minded the children for a period each day, and found them exhausting. She was as usual, she said. ‘I’m just the same, the same as usual.’ Alice leaned back in her chair and thought about her mother, typing with slow and careful progress this almost uninflected letter. There was nothing of Pat, no trace of the personification that often surges into the e-mails, unwithheld by constraints of correct expression, driven by speed, birthed by the cyberspatial illusion of unaccountability. Avoiding e-mail laxities, Pat avoided genuine disclosure.

  Alice replied tersely, saying that she would ring on Sunday. Around her, other internet clients stared into their cubes of light, arranged liaisons, gambled money, looked deep into the gaping bodies of strangers, sent business messages to the distant ends of the globe. The man sitting next to her downloaded a tourist map of Cuba. The room was thick with information, with webs, with licit and illicit connections, with precipitous surplus. Alice lurched out into the drizzling rain and took a deep breath. She raised her umbrella and without pausing, dashed dangerously into the traffic. She was three streets away before she realised she had forgotten to log out.

  Mr Sakamoto said later that Alice made no sense, that one could not love technology and hate the internet. It was a logical contradiction.

  ‘I am large enough,’ Alice responded, ‘to contain contradictions.’

  Mr Sakamoto laughed.

  ‘Let me tell you’, he said, ‘about the kamishibai man. When my daughters were little, there still existed in Japan a few kamishibai men, oral storytellers who went from village to village on bicycles. Our kamishibai man arrived by train and set himself up at the local library, but essentially he still performed the same function. He held up sequences of cards, which formed the basis of his story. Sometimes he had notes on the back of each card; sometimes he simply knew from practice what to say. The children were entranced. It was a delightful combination of image and voice – black ink line drawings of great sensitivity, and this man – whose name we never discovered – playing with a range of voices, stretching into a high falsetto and sinking into a low rumble.’

  ‘And the connection with the internet?’

  ‘No connection, really. My point is that the kamishibai man existed alongside television and movies and other forms of storytelling. Nothing is lost. There are no cataclysmic displacements or the sudden vanishing of forms. Books still exist. Millions of people still read them. Perhaps even kamishibai men still exist …’

  Alice was swimming laps in the interior pool at Les Halles. Although she walked miles around the city, she needed this immersion, this strenuous repetition of arms and legs, striving, going nowhere. Under the fluorescent lights the surface of the water looked oily, with an iridescent sheen that her body broke, and broke again. Its blue was startling, a Grecian indigo. Tiles, artfully deceitful, created this false Aegean, this jetsetter’s hue. The stench of chlorine was making Alice feel dizzy. She listened to herself in the water, heard her lungs filling and emptying, the huff and puff of her exercise. When she lifted her head the muffled amplification of the pool thundered around her. Down, back into the body. Up, the clang of a shout reverberating between the walls, the rise and fall of voices, the almost clattering sound of a splash. She could not have explained her hypersensitivity. As she worked her arms and legs like a machine, she heard more than anything her organic self, her blood, her breath, her heaving body, and felt a vague distress, as if she were crying in the water. Her black swimsuit rode up and clung tight, and with her thumbs she pulled it down and snapped it around her buttocks. She stopped, and trod water. All of a sudden she knew. She was missing windsurfing. The wet body that rises and flies away, straight towards the horizon. The labour of muscles, straining and feeling tight for a pull towards the sky, and the flash of a sheath of light, suddenly descending.

  11

  When they returned to the bistro, the two waiters greeted Mr Sakamoto with kisses and exclamations. It was as if he were a sit-com hero, who solves the problems by the end of an episode, and is then regarded with demonstrative affection by his fellow players. Alice heard herself introduced as ‘a fine young scholar from Australia’, and then she too was enjoined in this magic circle. The older of the waiters, Jacques, fussed and hung around, promising a spécialité, pouring them an aperitif neither really wanted. The waiters were reunited. Mr Sakamoto was Cupid, they said, responsible for their reunion. When he bowed, they returned his bow, pleased to be implicated in his world of ceremonious thoughtfulness.

  Over lunch he expressed nervous anticipation about Clare. Her arrival was imminent – at the end of the week – and he felt she was coming under false pretences, that he had told her of his lonely widower’s life and she had imagined romance. After two aperitifs and a glass of wine, however, Mr Sakamoto’s nervousness fled. He became voluble and cheery.

  ‘I suppose we could always travel together for a while,’ he told Alice. ‘Get to know one another. See what happens …’

  He seemed to be asking her advice.

  The noise in the bistro rose in a sudden roar. A large group of businessmen were celebrating something. They toasted with arms upraised and slapped one another’s backs. They all had loosened ties and alcoholic expressions. Two men were simultaneously shouting into mobile phones.

  ‘I’ve been wondering –’ said Alice, leaning closer, ‘just to change the subject – about the kamishibai man. Can you tell me one of his stories?’

  ‘They are stories for children,’ Mr Sakamoto said.

  ‘I know. But to give me some idea.’

  Mr Sakamoto stirred his truffle spaghetti, the spécialité, offered as a gift. ‘Excellent,’ he said, gesturing with his fork.

  ‘For Akiko and Haruko there was a favourite story, one they wished to hear again and again. It’s a famous Japanese folktale about a Princess of Bamboo. Once upon a time, there was an old man and his wife – a childless and virtuous peasant couple. One day the old man went to the bamboo grove to collect edible shoots, and saw there a bamboo stem illuminated in the middle. A white light shone with great radiance from within the plant. Curious to know what was inside, he carefully cut the bamboo and was astonished to find there a tiny baby, small enough to rest in the palm of his hand. He took the baby home, and he and his wife raised it as their own. The baby grew to become an extraordinarily beautiful woman, a woman graceful and good. (In the drawings she wore a kimono with a bamboo print and her long hair was loose and thick, resting on her back down to her waist.) Suitors came from all over Japan to propose marriage to the Bamboo Princess. However, she refused all offers, and became very sad, crying every day. Her parents were upset, but their daughter would not explain the nature or cause of her sadness. She became thin and pale, but of course remained very beautiful.’

  Here Mr Sakamoto paused to take large mouthfuls of his spaghetti, and a sip of red wine.

  ‘One night, a night of full moon, the Bamboo Princess told her parents she was crying because she had to return to her home in the moon. She had been delaying her departure, but now the time had come. Rays of moonbeam stretched down to transport her home. She embraced her old parents and gave them the elixir of life. Then she left, waving. There were lovely drawings of her ascension – a kind of path of light, a ray, pulling her upwards. In Japan we have a traditional reverence for the moon. And for bamboo, as well. I used to think that my daughters liked the story because it is a
bout escaping one’s parents, but Haruko told me when she grew up that they both liked the idea of a princess living in the moon. Haruko used to talk to her, she said, in a private conversation. They could see her face, up there, somewhere in the moon.’

  Mr Sakamoto resumed his meal. ‘Excellent,’ he said again.

  These precious stories, Alice was thinking. These clandestine histories of children, sewn with patches of fantasy, spaced out, far-fetched, bold in their childish strangeness.

  ‘You’re quiet today,’ Mr Sakamoto said. He was twirling the final forkful of his special spaghetti.

  ‘I was thinking about children.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘And about the moon. Did you know that since Apollo 11 the moon is covered with footprints? And because there is no wind on the moon, no rain, no erosion, no kind of agitation, the footprints will stay there, undisturbed, for millennia to come. It troubles me, this defacement. The surface of the moon, the face of the moon, trampled, stamped by ridged boots.’

  Mr Sakamoto wiped his plate with a piece of bread and then threw it into his mouth with satisfying conclusiveness. He swallowed the bread in a gulp, and with another finished his wine. Alice thought to herself that he ate like an Italian gangster in a movie. She had rarely seen him eat with such pleasure.

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ he said. ‘You make it sound like a violation.’

  ‘Think of it,’ insisted Alice. ‘Footprints by the thousand on the Sea of Tranquillity.’ She bent over her meal, conscious that Mr Sakamoto was sitting back in his chair, sated.

  ‘About Clare,’ he began.

  ‘See how it goes on Friday. Make a decision then.’

  ‘That’s what Uncle Tadeo said.’

  As if on cue, Mr Sakamoto’s mobile telephone rang. The opening bars of the 1812 Overture, in a trilling version, sounded absurdly loud.

  ‘Moshi, Moshi?’

  It was Uncle Tadeo, having a sleepless night. Alice listened to Mr Sakamoto’s Japanese voice. He spoke in a low, regular and solicitous tone, even though it sounded to her a mountainous language, full of peaks and valleys, of rises and declensions. Unable to recognise a single word, Alice tried to imagine Uncle Tadeo – perhaps sitting up in bed, propped by large pillows, under ivory lamplight, his thin hair mussed from tossing and turning, the receiver clamped to his ear, listening with an old man’s concentration to a beloved voice, Hiroshi’s voice, travelling from day in Paris to night in Tokyo, contracting the globe in no time at all.

  Let me tell you, wrote Mr Sakamoto, about Guglielmo Marconi, inventor of the wireless. This is a story of the triumph of the letter ‘S’ and of frills of sound waves sent spinning into the air.

  Marconi was of a noble family, his father an Italian gentleman, his mother an Irish aristocrat, and when he came bawling into the world in 1874 he broadcast his existence to all Bologna. His parents were delighted. In Italy, as in Japan, a hefty cry is the sign of a full-blooming life. A hefty cry is a celebration. Of lungs sucking energy. Of inspiration. Later, as an adult, Marconi became soft-spoken. As befits a man of his class, a man who has ingrained in his manner the confidence of wealth and a private education, he bore advantages that meant that the slightest assertion of voice would be attended to and taken notice of. He was a refined fellow, both Irish and Italian in his good looks, of elegant dress, and calm, fastidious manner. His centre-parted hair was always neat, his manicured fingernails were clean as a whistle. Women noticed the moony cuticles and slender fingers (since women then, as today, were always remarking on the attractiveness of men’s hands).

  At only twenty-six years old Marconi patented the principle of ‘syntonic telegraph’, wireless communication. He designed a transmitter to send, and a receiver to detect, waves of radio. In the air was babble, data, rippling messages. They needed only to be dialled into audible existence, electromagnetically. Wires were base, material, tangled redundancies. But the gathering of waves, that was a new captivation; that was as beautiful as philosophy. It was as though the air was revealed in its mazed potentiality. It was like hearing angels. A pair of lovely hands twitched at knobs and adjusted valves. Crystals were set in place, amplifiers, coils. Marconi launched his own signals and sifted the air for their return.

  And the letter ‘S’? In December 1901, determined to prove that wireless waves were not affected by the curvature of the earth, Marconi set up a system across the Atlantic, stretching between Cornwall and Newfoundland. The receiver in Canada used a coherer, a glass tube filled with iron filings, to conduct radio waves, and a balloon was employed to lift the antenna as high as possible. The message sent was the letter ‘S’, in Morse code. Marconi was jubilant. This was an epochal discovery. After this success he investigated radar, short waves and microwaves, the whole epiphenomena of the tingling skies.

  Guglielmo Marconi received so many honours and awards that he died, it is said, of ornamentation. Among the most prestigious: the Nobel Prize for Physics, the Albert Medal of the Royal Society, the John Fritz Medal, the Kelvin Medal, the Order of St Anne (from the Tsar of Russia), the Commander of the Order of St Maurice and St Lazarus and the Grand Cross of the Order of the Crown of Italy (from the King of Italy), the Freedom of the City of Rome, Chevalier of the Civil Order of Savoy, Senatore of the Italian Senate, Honorary Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order … and finally the hereditary title of Marchese. No man can endure this much accolade. Celebrity exhausted and finally killed him. We must imagine that in death Marconi’s hands were folded in a tidy V on his chest, released at last from all that fidgeting with radiophonic components in the search for ruffles of sound, those exquisite tides.

  On her eleventh birthday, Norah tried, with her hands in a W, to strangle her older sister. She was wearing a party dress, newly sewn, in tangerine and violet. It had a kind of pop art design and she thought it hideous. Alice teased and tormented her. They were preparing for a party, setting the table with bowls of food composed almost wholly of salt and sugar when, with an energy that surprised them both, Norah knocked Alice to the floor. She leaped upon Alice’s prone body and grasped her throat with both hands. It was not play, or jest, but serious violence. Alice saw Norah’s face swell and redden and felt her own throat collapse and her eyes spring tears. Their faces were very close; they stared at each other. Norah’s lips were pursed, as if she were threading a needle. Alice pushed at her shoulders, but the weight of anger was too heavy, too imperative, to dislodge.

  This is stupid, Alice thought, as she gasped and choked for air.

  It may have been only seconds, but for each sister it was an extended and brutal moment, one that would follow them into the future as an unimaginable outrage. Fred appeared from nowhere and seized Norah from behind, pulling her away. Alice saw a flash of tangerine and violet as she took a deep breath. Her father’s hands shook. He appeared to be trembling with distress. He sent Norah to her room and bent to lift Alice and inspect her throat. She too was sent away to her room. When Norah’s friends arrived and the party began, Alice did not join them. She lay on her bed weeping, not from any pain, but from something intimately wrong that had no name. She could hear Norah receiving gifts with giggling chatter, and the high-pitched tones of girlish excitement. She could hear paper unwrapping and objects admired. Life was continuing without her. People were happy. Pat appeared at Alice’s doorway with her hands on her hips and told her not to sulk, that if she wasn’t careful she would miss the ice cream and jelly. Then without waiting for a reply or explanation, she turned and left.

  The misery of a thirteen-year-old girl has a kind of ferocity. It is a consuming darkness, a simple warped thing. Alice felt hurt and ridiculous. She felt unloved. For all her heterodox assertions and eccentric ambitions, she knew too that she was composed of these disintegrating possibilities. Beyond her room children were singing ‘Happy Birthday’ and photographs were being taken. There was the exaggerated gaiety of hyped-up voices, a squeal here and there, a jolly call. When the song had concluded and the ch
eers had died away, Fred knocked gently and called through the door: ‘A cuppa tea about now, what do you think?’

  ‘Thanks,’ Alice called back.

  He had come to rescue her. In all that had happened and in the extremity of her feelings, this fatherly gesture was a deep consolation. Alice dried her eyes and looked at herself in the mirror. Her face swam there, bleary and immaterial. She wondered what she would look like as an adult. If she would be more solid. If, behind the mask of an astronaut’s visor, she would be untouchable and stare down at the world like a god. Space opened before her. Stars. Galaxies. She would float away. They would all miss her terribly.

  When Fred brought in a cup of tea and a slice of birthday cake, they sat on the bed together, side by side, and jointly regretted they were missing the big match. It was a quarter-final. Their team was not playing, but all week they had discussed the possible outcome and the shuffling of names and rankings on the competition ladder.

  Alice lay her head in her father’s lap. He brushed back her fringe and kissed her forehead.