The House of Breathing Read online

  Anna watched the scene at first, but then became a participant. However she was not at all sure which character she played. She was simultaneously the evil dowager and the tragic princess; she was either or both; she was hideously divided. And as the woman was thrust down the well (both herself and not herself) there was a cataclysmic sound as the floating objects, their spell broken, came crashing to the ground.

  So here is Anna, aroused in the night, and having uttered the words ‘China’, ‘Beijing’, relocated in that city. Awakened by lostness she now calmed her fear, becoming sensible and still. She felt suddenly a certain self-contempt and recrimination, that she had stayed so long in Beijing, wasting time and money, so aimless and indulgent. She sat in her bed and thought of her wanderings, of her visits to the square, her mis-spent days.

  Then, quite unexpectedly, she realised what it was that the young man had been saying; she solved the riddle of his slogan. The young man—and how could she have missed it, how could she have been so obtuse—had been saying ‘June four’; he had been commemorating the date upon which the Tiananmen massacre occurred. Anna had idiotically misunderstood.

  Anna lay back on her bed, swathed in silk. She resolved to leave, to fly to Hong Kong. She closed her eyes, longing, passionately longing, for Orientalist clichés, for a city wholly of palaces, pagodas, bowed bridges and trailing cranes. Without history. Without the square. Without the young man, whose image she could not now eradicate.

  These Eyes

  If thou wilt weep my fortunes, take my eyes.

  … Thou must be patient; we came crying hither:

  Thou know’st, the first time we smell the air

  We wawl and cry …

  King Lear IV, vi.I

  The man sitting opposite Paulina is reading King Lear. He stepped in at the last stop, found his seat discreetly without at all glancing around, and with, it seemed, that kind of suave self-enclosure possessed by priests and librarians simply opened his book.

  He is apparently unaware of the flagrant oddity of this gesture, of its unAustralianness: that a man on a suburban train, rocking its cargo of tired souls from the city in the evening through a bland, undeviating route sketched out like a beaded necklace in small diagrams over the doorways; that a man on such a train—given over, after all, to utility, containment and strict regulation—should so casually read Shakespeare. It is a singular act. It has a certain stupidity or temerity. A certain novelty of dislocation. There are newspaper readers, of course, flicking open the pages or scanning tiny rectangular narratives of murder and mayhem, and there are also, here and there, blockbuster devotees, hunched in positions of engrossed concentration. But this man is enacting in his head a five act Elizabethan drama of the most verbose, intolerable and high-cultural misery. He is silently reeling out dialogue, impersonating a dramatis personae of kings and lords, fools and princesses, the traitorous, the faithful, the vicious and the innocent. He is inwardly transmigrating through character after character, shifting disembodied through a series of avatars and incarnations. He zig-zags between personages, creates unheard blank verse, lonely soliloquies and silent, exclamatory lines of terrible lamentation.

  Paulina, let us be frank, is transfixed by this man.

  She observes him carefully. His vicinity is such that she can both summarise his whole shape, and yet also detect those fine details usually reserved for a lover’s scrutiny. Overall he has a kind of integrity to his bearing, one granted, perhaps, by the autism of reading. He unselfconsciously slouches, but in such a way as to seem to refer to a more comfortable seat, as though his body recalls a familiar reading position that is more habitual and private. He is dressed indistinctly; that is to say Paulina finds it difficult to discern any clues as to profession or social standing. Too poor to be an academic—there is a certain shabbiness to his appearance, and his shirt is white and long-sleeved and therefore possibly clerkish—he is also, apparently, too old to be a student, bearing, as he does, traces of silver-grey in perceptibly thinning hair. He wears unfashionable corduroy trousers and shoes of brown leather. There is no brief case or bag; the only accessory is the book.

  The face is beautiful. It is a foreign face, a face, that is, that Paulina thinks immediately is in some way or in some measure migrant. It is long with a large and aquiline nose and bears generous lips, slightly unsealed. There is a pallor which Paulina imagines to be middle European: people from places like Prague or Budapest, she seems to recall, carry the colours of their city upon their faces; they are defined by location, assume the greys and blues of stone buildings and statues, ever after announce their contiguity with certain cityscapes always fixed mysteriously in the spectrum of winter. The man’s eyes confirm this: although she can see them only in arcs behind lids and lashes Paulina knows these are the eyes of a man who has looked at the world through the obliterations of snow, who has lived under penumbral European skies and who squints in disbelief at Antipodean summers. These eyes, which are chestnut, move slowly beneath the lids. They slide left to right in limpid and continuous absorption of each long, anfractuous line. There is an inexplicable ease in this act of reading so that Paulina thinks of the phrase ‘learned-by-heart’ and wonders if, in fact, the man is an actor (she imagines a coffee-coloured dressing room with lines of mirrors studded with light bulbs and containing, in receding perspective, multiplied versions of his face); or if, just as plausibly, he is some sort of wretched autodidact for whom the very name William Shakespeare promises metaphysical solace and incontrovertible gravity (and here she conjures an austere room with a modest shelf of books, a single chair, not unlike Van Gogh’s, and a fan-shaped light issuing diffusely through a half-opened door). In any case the man continues to read, secure in his invisible, autonomous life, secretive and oblivious to her speculations.

  The train within which this unreciprocated observation takes place is hot and noisy. It is a summer’s eve, and the air is hung with commingling odours of sweat and cigarette smoke, both of which are intensified by conditions of rush-hour proximity. A metallic straining and screeching pervades the train which, though impressively automatic and not yet old, shudders with a kind of creaturely death-rattle again and again at each halt upon its journey. The man does not look up from his book as the train buckles and pauses; he is caught in an elsewhere more ineluctably persuasive. He is on the moors with King Lear, or in the castle of Gloucester, or lost, flower-bedecked, in a field somewhere near Dover. Paulina tries to read in his face an exact location, but finds that she cannot; and her incertitude, though reasonable, undermines and destabilises her.

  Outside is a world made slippery with speed—tin fences, houses, embankments of yellow grass, elongated shadows cast blankly by billboards, a light, in flashes, of that peculiar fleeting period when afternoon brass disperses to evening mauve—and Paulina is visited all of a sudden by her own obscure melancholy. The man with King Lear has occasioned three separate reflections which she disentangles now and sets out before herself as though selfhood were merely a matter of poised accounting and enumeration, as though being a teacher of English literature with a name and a reputation—for solicitous treatment of students, for flighty opinions and inordinate shyness—was not substantially or essentially what she was, but these insurgent moments, coincident always with a kind of idiosyncratic sadness (yet vague, aleatory, in many ways minor), and always requiring, to some degree, acknowledgement and attention, marked most specifically her actual condition.

  The initial reflection (and how she smiles to glimpse it, how very private it seems in this train all a-rattle) is of an erotic fantasy. Paulina is in love with a married man to whom, as a consequence of their absolute estrangement, she directs hours of irresponsible and irrepressible longing, many of which moments form themselves, like animated snapshots, in sexual imaginings of elaborate acts of tenderness. She realises now that the most flagrant and lusty of all her fictions is less glorious than a single and simple image: her beloved reading b
eside her in bed, quiet, still, and so replete with her presence as to seem utterly indifferent to it. Without words they would nestle in a comfortable complicity. His eyes would be magnified by the glass of steel-rimmed spectacles, his book contained in an ecclesiastical handclasp of interlacing fingers and tilted, just so, to catch the angle of lamplight (from a lamp pink-coloured and tulip-shaped and chosen pragmatically not for reading after all but for the romantic tint of its radiance); his naked chest would rise and fall—in ever so mere and relaxed a fluctuation; and his face would be exquisitely close and illuminated so that every flaw, blotch and incipient wrinkle was clearly apparent, so that it was a face known and loved in its complete specificity.

  Paulina looks out through the window pane at the backwards racing suburban scenery—the shadows are still stretching, the light almost sunless—and thinks this static vision supremely amorous. It combines in delicate balance expectation and satiation, is both ardent and exemplary.

  The man reading King Lear has shifted in his seat, being somewhat hedged in by a woman of copious dimensions who perspires conspicuously and scowls at the world under a vestigial moustache. He has changed position slightly so that Paulina can see his face in an averted three-quarter profile and now notes once again its quality of captivated studiousness. The man has partly creased his brow as though the madness of Lear is beginning at last to perplex him, or as if, perhaps, he is haunted by some disturbing intuition or reminiscence inspired by speeches shouted in his head at the pitiless heavens. Paulina watches his face, summons, almost involuntarily, certain random though generically allied fragments of quotation (Pour on, I will endure; This is the worst; I am bound on a wheel of fire; Blow winds, crack your cheeks. Rage, blow!), and registers with care her second reflection.

  It was years ago when, as a young undergraduate, she had gone alone to a campus viewing of a Russian movie of King Lear. In those days she was less shy and more self-dramatising, and clothed entirely in black and boldly singular, she had sat spectacularly in the very front row. What she saw was this: it was a black-and-white film, laboriously subtitled and epically miserable. There were Slavic faces streaked with rain and contorted in close-ups of unbearable anguish. Lear himself was bedraggled beyond endurance and had grief-veined eyes of watery translucence that seemed always to be at the point of brimming to tears. There was a Fool epileptic, a Cordelia ethereal, a Gloucester noble and a series of camera shots which, when not so close as to record each single blink and drawn breath, were taken from high in the sky, from a God’s-eye-view. In a particular scene (she now recalls it), maddened horses fretted within their compound, whinnied and kicked and set the whole screen shaking—or so it then seemed—with the force of agitations occasioned by the tempest. And though lightning brightly and stereotypically flashed and thunder loudly and melodramatically boomed Paulina found it all entirely riveting. So much rain and suffering, the torsion of perspectives between the intimate and the planetary. By the end of the movie she felt herself storm-wracked and reduced to tatters and left the cinema, moved out into the night, and, unembarrassed by the stream of leaving students, simply burst into tears.

  Could she have said what she cried for? Could she have known? The buildings are black and skidding silhouettes as the train shudders to another halt and the man reading King Lear, to Paulina’s astonishment, lifts his migrant face and glances up for a second. He appears to meet her gaze, but it is instead one of those unfocused occasions of momentary distraction, for within the space of another second or two he is re-entrenched Shakespearian. It has been a moment of unseeing, of unintercepted isolation.

  Paulina’s third reflection—and this one seems to her the most difficult and involuted, the most in need of examination—is of a blinded child. When first she read King Lear it was not so much Lear’s storm and madness that troubled her, but the motif of blindness. For as she read, in that state of cautious part-incomprehension that attends the young literature student, continual reference to the inefficiency and failure of eyes caused her mounting anxiety. At the point at which the Earl of Gloucester is threatened with blindness, Cornwell, his captor, utters words of awful cruelty: Out, vile jelly. Where is thy luster now? and this was to Paulina so dreadful a line—among many others, it must be said, that had conspired to place her in dread of what she was reading—that some fissure opened in time, and the lost memory of an event in her fifth year returned.

  She had been living, in those days, with her impoverished family in a working-class country town, a time she recalls now as always governed by sensations of vague hunger and drowsy heat. Next door lived a fatherless family of numerous children, the youngest of whom, an infant of two, was left alone, tied in her cot, when her mother went out to work. Paulina visited this child from time to time, since the house was always left open and with her own siblings at school this was at least, in a five year old’s practical estimation, a form of company. One day attracted by unprecedented screams, Paulina entered to find the child standing up in her cot with an eye gouged out and the other broken and damaged. Eye matter streamed down a face which seemed entirely fluid, composed of blood, tears and features which in their agony were robbed of distinctiveness. Paulina remembers thinking—in a childish and matter-of-fact comparison—that the ruined eye resembled shattered jelly. On the floor of the cot lay a bloodied fork which, along with various other household objects and appliances—a tin teapot, a spoon, plastic cups and a wire sieve—had been left, somewhat pathetically, as infant playthings. In a slightly delayed response Paulina was engulfed by revulsion. She fled to summon her mother and dully remembers that she spent the rest of the morning alone as her mother accompanied the child to hospital. That night—and how lucid and compelling this single moment is recollected—her father, presiding at the dinner table, waved magisterially his own fork in the air, nodded in the direction of the neighbour’s house and pronounced in a tone of gravest accusation: ‘It is that woman who is blind’.

  The train has achieved a rhythmic motion and here, in the belly of this sliding machine, faced with this unnegotiable distance between that memory and herself, between the reader and her curiosity, Paulina suspects that her total repression of that event was not, as might be expected, some protective consequence of its gory spectacle, but rather of her father’s words. As if physical ruination were not enough, he implied the existence of a realm of non-material wounding, of guilty negligence, of what in the gaudy and hyperbolic mode of childhood imagining represented an almost Shakespearian order of destruction and contamination.

  The large woman sitting opposite heaves herself upwards to prepare for disembarkation. The train again slows and Paulina, now filled with a quality of sad estrangement, looks intently at the man’s face as if in so doing she might will him to notice or acknowledge her presence. In a few seconds of stillness he remains inaccessible.

  Outside the sky has blackened and in an optical, night-time trick of the light, her own face has appeared in apparition on the window. It hovers like a ghost in the dark, phantasmally vague, and now, with the train’s increasing acceleration, appears lightly carried along, as though keeping steady pace or in ingenious concert.

  With—what form of resolve is it, in fact?—Paulina decides at last that she will speak. She looks again at the man’s face, at his snow-accustomed eyes, at the portentousness of his frown, at the lips, still parted as though such reading might require a little more oxygen than usual, at, last of all, the bowed curve of his nose, and unscrambles a sequence of potential words. She must not sound intrusive or rude, nor gauche or academic. She must not signal attraction, nor present herself as unfriendly. Yet as she hesitates and pauses, fixed with such purpose upon this man, this man reading King Lear, this man with whom, despite the strict quality of immurement which surrounds him, Paulina wishes to form some interrelation, she simply cannot heave her heart into her mouth. The train rocks and lurches and she actually says nothing. Nothing at all.

  Paulin
a’s destination is finally near. She and the insubstantial face on the window rise up and sidle into the corridor. The man continues to read, his eyes downcast. And as she steps out onto the platform she catches a last glimpse of him through the bright square window; bent in a kind of scholarly pose, the very picture of a man reading, like some clever and intricate Elizabethan engraving, he is also closed, unknown and now swept swiftly away, carried off noisily into the night.

  Irrationally Paulina feels abandoned. With the other commuters she begins the walk up the railway platform and imagines, again irrationally, that perhaps her ghostly face is still riding on the window, watching the man reading and still trying to discern his exact location in the drama. The black sky stretches above, so saturated with her feelings as to appear entirely starless, and Paulina thinks of King Lear stumbling stupidly through the storm, of his jingly jangly Fool, so illogically wise, of this city through which she nightly travels, unconnected to anybody, isolated in a tissue of complicated memories; she thinks too of her beloved, tantalisingly distant and existing in visions, of the infant with no eyes, dissolving into tragedy, of cinematic tempests raging in black and white, of pinkish lamps, of the slow turning of pages, and finally, most peculiarly, of a few words in strange recurrence: ‘learned-by-heart’.

  The House of Breathing