The House of Breathing Read online

  More, you said, still wetted by my kiss, still light re-defined.

  The boundary of the sun, if you can call it that, is known as the photosphere. Bright localised areas are called faculae; then there are sunspots, which appear as dark and sometimes as cavities, and granules which move incessantly over the solar surface. Granular patterns on the surface show us the sun’s state of turbulence.

  Faculae, you said, mimicking my accent. What a wonderful word. From the Latin, for torch.

  We talk, I said, of quiet suns and active suns. Quiet suns are those in which sunspots are minimal; active implies sunspots and flares in great number. Sunspots are my particular interest and area of study.

  Mine would be faculae, you said somewhat smugly, and turned over again, setting your precious pelt slowly sliding, taking your human face further away.

  II

  On the beach beside me I saw you bright. In the sunstruck light, reclined and vulnerable, you were more tenderly white-coloured than I had expected you to be. The ghost of your shirt could be traced in pallid areas on the planes of your skin. It was a body unaccustomed to sun exposure, a body still showing, in prissy neat outline, the site of its prior, civilised coverage.

  The sun had nevertheless endowered you with sunspots of its own. I noted for the first time the number of your freckles, inconsistencies of colour, granular surfaces. Across the arc of your chest were flung spots by the dozens: and how my fingers longed to properly enumerate! Lower were the curves of soft and kissable skin so hidden as to be almost a lunar blue.

  My gaze shilly-shallied with amatory distraction between the day-time and night-time spaces of your body.

  Your face was eclipsed by the encirclement of a sun hat and without seeing I knew that it was burnished as brass. Refracted light through straw would generously lacquer; there would be an opulence to the cheeks, a glow at the forehead, a gloss transpicuous to the whole of your handsomely self-enclosed features.

  In its aspect of brilliance the beach was almost intolerable. I had come to this country to observe the sun, but felt nothing so much as the sun’s observation. The air in Australia had too much light, was too abrupt, too insistent, too filled up with sting and excoriation. Bodies were more definite, shadows were darker, skin almost flinched. Yet I lay there forever, prone in the glare, comfortable with the shape of your resting beside me.

  From beneath my straw hat, my own circle of shade, I watched like a spy. Tiny grains of sand lay resting indistinctly in the hairs on your arm. Your chest rose and sank; your skin was tinting pink. An ear had escaped the compass of your hat: I looked into its curlicues and thought with your thoughts of the sound of the sea, how the waves, so close, pushed up and dispersed with a gentle collapse, how the low pitch of wind interpenetrated the water and muffled its splashes, how, with concentration, one could hear one’s own breath entering and leaving, in the midst of the sea sounds.

  Tell me, you said, tell me more of the sun. What does it send us, we mad dogs and Englishmen, apart from sunburn?

  The sun, I said, emits many things. It emits radiation at radio wavelengths. When the sun is very active irregular outbursts of radio noise will occur. Intense radio storms are associated with solar flares. Photons of infra-red, visible light, ultraviolet and radio waves are all ejected. There are also X-rays and cosmic rays leaving the sun at high velocities. We think too there are neutrinos—atomic particles of no mass or electromagnetic properties—which reach us from the sun. These are the by-products of nuclear reactions at the centre of the sun, but are as yet somewhat scientifically elusive. Colleagues in America, in North Dakota, have placed a tank of forty thousand litres of cleaning fluid in a goldmine one and a half kilometres deep in order to capture and calculate neutrinos from the sun.

  At this point you laughed. Ah my text-book lover, you whispered under your hat. My crazy professor. My know-it-all scientist.

  I did not feel encouraged to explain the experiment. The sound of the waves filled our wordless interval. Your lips, I supposed, bore the hint of a smile.

  There is also solar wind. Interplanetary space is not empty, but contains, as well as dust and other meteoric particles, a magnetised plasma originating from the sun. This material streams away radially and at high velocity, and is composed, among other things, of positive ions, principally protons. As the sun rotates the solar plasma sprays outwards, creating a spiral of force lines right throughout the solar system.

  I paused for response. Like a dancer, I added, hoping to please. Like a dancer with long skirts, swirling out colour.

  You lifted the corner of your eclipsing sun hat and peered superciliously with one sea-green eye.

  I zee, you said, in Hollywood German. I zee you are becomink incompetently metaphorical!

  You rolled and drew me near and our sun hats collided. I felt a creaturely warmth in the salty pores of your skin. And on your lips the very taste of the sea.

  III

  Of all my private garments you liked more than any my chinoiserie. It was a lapis kimono spattered with chrysanthemums and held at the front by a simple satin tie. When I first wore it you adopted—as only you would—an extravagantly theatrical Chinese accent.

  Ah so! The woman astronomer comes clothed in deep space! See the many round suns that populate her blue! See how they orbit and swerve on her hidden entity! See light fly out! See sunspots! See faculae!

  These are oriental chrysanthemums, I sought to explain. Double blossomed chrysanthemums, a traditional design, and bought, from someone who knows, in the city of Hong Kong.

  Ah so! I shall kiss this sun, and this one here (and you kissed the chrysanthemums that lay above my breasts) and I shall slide my slender hand into this star-white gap to destroy all gravity! (And you slipped your hand nimbly through the opening of my garment, finding the fleshly gape, the introductory recess, and I felt it close softly on a nipple, on a breast, and began, at that moment, toppling away towards my bed, falling through a space made instantly accommodating by sweet expectation. I felt hair from your forehead brush lightly against my cheek. I felt my satin give way to your five fingers’ bold and astronautical exploration.)

  IV

  Eventually I managed to show you the sun. A quiet sun had been displaced rather suddenly by an active sun, so I took the small telescope I had owned since childhood and set it up in the garden. I inserted a Huyghens lens—which is the one used by amateurs to withstand the sharp heat of a solar focus—and placed beneath the eyepiece a sheet of white paper pinned onto a frame. By this simple method a projection appeared and I was able to show you the cluster of sunspots I was engaged in studying.

  Sunspots, I said, have a particular structure. The core is the umbra; the lighter region beyond the core is known as the penumbra. And you can just see, if you look very carefully, a suggestion of filaments shimmering around the penumbra and radiating outwards.

  I watched you bend closer. You studied for some time the disk caught on paper. The light on your neck made it orange and adorable. The hairs on your neck curled up in tight curls.

  Where are the faculae?, you asked at last.

  Here, I said, gently shaking the frame. You only notice faculae when the image moves.

  You bent over again and watched as the bright spots, so casually indiscernible, became visible by motion. Pinpricks of radiance, like small perforations, slipped here and there over the surface of the paper.

  Ah! you exclaimed, raising your face with its prepossessing smile. Ah!, there they are!

  V

  My bedroom was an entire, bamboo-screened world. It was quiet, but not still; I liked to imagine the sensation of rippled floatation, as though the whole house was transported and somehow mysteriously sea-borne.

  Since your body was sunburned I treated it gently. I poured scented oil into the cups of my hands and with the tips of my fingers spread it with care. The rounds of your shoulders were a
painful vermilion. Your nose blazed red, your cheeks blushed bridal. My fingers drew shine over your trembling eyelids.

  With the sun too low to present you striped, you were represented human. I traced out your form with the application of shine; I enhanced its morphology, rendered it aromatic, refigured by subtle distribution of light its planes and shadows and skin-sensitive enclaves. Under my lubricated touch you were lustrous and singular, oil-lovely, supine. Chest and abdomen submitted to my caress. I trailed bronze routes with single finger delicacy, then opened my hands for a more generous fondle. At your hips, causing pause, was a triangle of white which showed, perfectly outlined, the template of your bathers. And within the triangle, as though eccentrically framed, lay the bulbs and the bumps of your splendid genitals. With the restraint of an old nurse I dawdled my slow fingers in the chaste area of your chest, and recalled, over your body, the soft tumble of waves you taught me to listen to. I heard the water and the wind, unquiet, implacable; I filled up my room with the sea sounds you had given me, sounds I had never quite heard until, on the beach, your eyes spangled and bright, your intelligence attentive, your ear alert, you said to me: listen!

  VI

  When we met one day at the new coffee shop I showed the paper I had written on prominences. You lifted your face from its feed of croissant and pushed back a cup.

  Always ready, my teacher, to become illuminated!

  Your tone was ambiguous. From your head you doffed an invisible cap (invisibly feathered) and swept it very low in an ironically Elizabethan gesture of deference.

  I watched your freckled hands shuffle away at the papers and knew at once that you would not wish to read what I had written. I tried to entice. Prominences, I explained, are the most beautiful and spectacular of solar phenomena. They appear at the edges of the sun as flame-like clouds taking shapes which astronomers classify familiarly, according to earthly analogies. So there are rains, funnels, trees and even hedgerows. But the shapes themselves always evade these classifications: they only approximate what we describe; they are more multiple and inexact. They are also perverse. Prominences give the impression of surging way upwards but are often, in fact, flowing down to the chromosphere. They are brilliant and impulsive; they work both in puffs and gaseous surges.

  Your hand had slowly reclaimed the cup. Your eyes were downcast, studying, it seemed, the shallow pool of coffee. A flake of croissant had caught on your chin. As I leant carefully forward to attempt to remove it, offering public tenderness, you leant back rather quickly, startled and furtive.

  Must rush, you said, and in an instant were gone.

  VII

  We ceased meeting in the day and by night you could not bear the revelation of lights. I should have known but did not—in the stupidity of love—that your decision for darkness was bound to be significant.

  You said: Your observatory eye, you are greedy, you peer, I am an object of surveillance!

  So that night I clasped a lover that was mere silhouette, arrogated and transformed by the dark of the night. When we rolled together I could not have been sure who you actually were: it was a presence I rolled with, a sort of reversal. I felt your weight upon me, heard the wind of your breath, but was still uncertain.

  Together we met in a blind entwining, hopelessly benighted. I ran my fingers over your features for an exact certification, anxiously seeking a message in Braille. I groped and fidgeted, lover-inept.

  When our bodies parted I waited for words but they did not seem to come. Then as I began at last to speak you straight away intercepted:

  Fucking pedant! Your intellectual arrogance! Positivist! Scientist!

  And the darkness pushed between us like a dissevering wedge.

  VIII

  I remember, now, with importunate precision. On our last night together I wore silver stellar ear-rings and an Indian silk scarf. The fabric of my dress was soft and voluminous. My legs were clothed in stockings; I was beautiful, full. I disrobed in the light while you waited under the covers. You watched my every movement. You watched as I lowered and unfurled, with seductive delay, the black sheen on my legs. As I slid away the fabric. As I stood, ready. About my neck remained the Indian scarf: I had let it remain as an erotic delectation, a gift, a speciality.

  You’ve forgotten the scarf, you said abruptly from the bed.

  I fumbled at the knot (still so eager to please!) and in impatience sent the silk scarf flinging away. It rose up in a trembling arc and descended in slow motion, finding the shape of a series of loose, shiny and undulant arabesques. It tilted in the air, back and forth and back and forth, its range of colours, its gleam, its elegance exotic, released in this simple rockabye of declivity.

  A prominence! I exclaimed, pleased with the act of recognition.

  And you turned your human face, silently and conclusively, away towards the wall.

  Other Places

  I

  The intersecting other place of this recollection is the island of Timor. On maps it appears as a tiny oblong, hanging at the end of the Indonesian archipelago, floating inconspicuously to the north of Australia. It is small but precise, a material place, with a politics, a currency, poor roads, monsoons, mountains, wild deer. There have been books written about it; it is certified, real. One can point on the map with a confident finger and say: here it is, you see, this is where I journeyed.

  But as I recollect now—in this most facile of transportations, this space-negating shift, this cartographical defiance, the island begins to quiver and become deliquescent; it melts suddenly away into the sapphire-blue sea, subsides as easily and tremulously as any fiction.

  How to substantiate? How to refabricate the unfashionable ‘real’?

  Let me begin—distrusting as I do the general and sempiternal—with a central spot and a specific time. The spot is the market place in the city of Dili, the capital of East Timor. Nothing about this market is fixed or permanent; there are no stalls or trestles, shelters or plastic signs, such as one sees elsewhere in commercial Asia. Nor is there anything of the pleasures of exchange, the colour of commodities, the lurid ornaments of display, the bustle of buyers. This is a place which is crude and rudimentary; it is a place of poverty.

  Vendors leave their villages in the inhospitable dark, walk jungle miles with straw baskets and slings, and come, eventually and in centripetal procession, to a large rectangle of stone foundations, the only remains of a once grand civic building bombed by the Japanese and never reconstructed. In this vacant site, this blank of a building, they assemble in an imperfect geometry of rows, lay their goods on the stones, squat on their haunches, and wait for light.

  When sunrise comes there is a second, more casual convergence of pedestrians. Other poor people enter the place of stones, move about slowly between the human rows, gaze down upon bananas, rice and fish, and begin to establish the equations of transaction. Tiny silver coins of minute denominations preciously travel from palm to palm. There is a certain polite haggling over paltry sums governed by the scrupulous justice of scarcity. Then finally the coins are deposited in laps, in concaves of fabric sumptuously patterned over by triangles, spheres, zigzags and diamonds, intermingled with hibiscus, oleander and plume shaped leaves.

  The fabrics these people wear invert the substance of their lives; they carry in representation the proclivities of decoration and embellishment they do not otherwise enjoy. The fabrics are dirty and faded, but this does not at all distract from their quality of anomaly.

  As the sun moves higher the vendors will place shallow baskets on their heads to serve as hats. Men stand up from time to time to air their hot genitals by flapping the splendid cloth of their lap-making sarongs.

  Women employ fans at beautiful, bronze, emaciated faces—faces a Eurocentric artist might wish to construe in the Exotic Island genre, might render, in consequence, more fleshly and more erotic. But the women at this moment evade the sublime.
Their thinness is unpainterly, their poses unconventional; moreover, like the men they chew the oblivion-giving betel nut. Their open mouths appear as cavernous pools of blood; their lips are red-ringed. Jets of scarlet spittle are expertly ejected in long narrow arcs. The betel nut chewing is culturally enclosing; in this way the market women remain narcotic and aloof.

  The heat becomes visible in a series of verticals and begins at this stage to corrupt the produce on display: mounds of carmine chillies shrivel untidily inwards; fish begin to stink and turn at the edges; bananas gain spots and exaggerate their curves. By noon most of the sunstruck food is removed. The disappointed people in their anomalous fabrics disassemble the rows and walk away into the sunlight, by now overhead and incandescently severe.

  The time of this market is the month of December in 1974. At this world-historical juncture East Timor is ruled over by the remote but not disinterested nation of Portugal.

  In the 1520s Portuguese merchants usurped the island, hoping for spices, slaves, minerals, sandalwood; longing, perhaps for the piratical exercise of illicit lusts, the adventure of governance, the amenities of power, the excesses of the imperial. On the Belunese and Atoni, the main indigenous clans, they imposed ineffectually a language and a religion; more effectually they wrought a system of economic deprivation.

  Apart from a few ostentatious stone buildings, a church here and there, a makeshift airport, there is little physical evidence of over four hundred years of colonial rule. The people still live in their ancient thatched huts (which come in rectangles, ovals and attractive beehives), still farm in a laborious and primitive fashion (the Asiatic mode-of-production intact, with no gifts of machinery from the mechanised West), still suffer the misery of decimating famines (with the saying ‘hunger as usual’ as their most famous slogan) and still honour the complex, devoluted authority of tribal chiefs, local allegiances, and matrilinearity (despite the Western exercise of larger and apparently more salient powers).