The House of Breathing Page 9

  What is terrible is that the men are so obviously beggars. Their dereliction is extreme. The man closest to Elizabeth is filthy, emaciated and almost naked; the one on the other side is little better off. Elizabeth feels rather offended at this terrible bad taste: to situate so proximate the gorgeous and the miserable. She lowers her camera and feels an illness arise within her. The noise of the generator is huge and rasping. There is a smell of hot metal.

  What happens occurs quickly. Tourist and beggar exchange short, swift glances; they meet, as it were, within the transit of a gaze. Then the beggar slips away. He stumbles in his path and begins falling into the crowd, falling much more heavily than his frail and disappearing shape would ever seem to suggest. Instinctually aroused, Elizabeth rushes to catch him. At this precise moment the generator loosens and slides on to her, halting upon the arm she had extended as support. Her flesh begins to sear. Metal burns away a disfiguring impression. The pain is exact: Elizabeth has never before felt so definite and empirical.

  At this point my colleague proposes his scholarly explanation. According to late Mediaeval legend—the story is not Biblical—a woman of Jerusalem, stricken with great piety on witnessing Christ labouring with his cross on the way up to Calvary, seized off her head cloth, moved forward from the crowd, and handed it over. Christ wiped his tired brow and returned the cloth to the woman; whereupon it was found that the fabric bore a perfect, clear likeness of the Divine face. This image was to be called the Vera-Icon (true likeness); the woman in question became St Veronica. Your Elizabeth, he said, merely re-enacts. She becomes anonymous and cultural; she has no significance other than that she recycles with predictability a plot already orthodox, conventional and known. That the icon of suffering is transferred to the body is of no particular interest; she still exists as translation. Unoriginal, old.

  As she collapses into the dust Elizabeth glimpses, with inexplicable clarity, the seller of peanuts. She sees a hand with paper cones and feels herself descend dizzily into a cone of her own.

  Someone has clasped her. A man has her by the waist and lifts her up and away. She is aware of caramel-coloured arms encircling her like a lover. The man is speaking in Hindi. He is assuming control. The wedding has moved on, taking its noise and lights and hot burning metal; and now Elizabeth, perversely novel and with the extra attraction of serious injury, has become the new spectacle. She sees a dense curve of people move their semicircle before her. They are a terrible congregation. Choosing pain from the cone she chooses the latter, and slants and slides away into its tiny black end.

  When Elizabeth awakens she is lying on her bed in the Hotel Lux. The rescuer is there with her, proclaiming in strange English that a doctor has been sent for. He bends down and casually takes up Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. He squats in the centre of the floor and having, apparently, nothing better to do, enters the Alps.

  An hour or so passes and no doctor comes. The man leaves without a word, taking Thomas Mann with him. Elizabeth chooses to curl up once more inside the cone.

  In the long day that follows she will turn and toss, thirst terribly for water, and replay again and again the vision that led to her accident. She will see money and lights and indecorous children. She will snap once again at the photographic images she had hoped to display. In a moment of lucidity it occurs to her that her camera has somewhere gone missing and she weeps at its loss as the blind might for sight; she feels not robbed but rather darkened and incapacitated.

  Accepting the man at his word Elizabeth waits for the doctor. She lays back like a patient expecting at any moment care and commiseration, the salve of kind hands, the cleanliness of hospitals, medicinal somnolence. Nobody comes.

  The day moves on without her, carrying sunlight from the large window in a slow, fluent slide down the facing wall, playing sounds from the street to prove that action continues, sending, from time to time, little clouds of grey dust to spiral and stir and settle down gradually, a shower of motes, in this tomb of a room.

  Towards twilight Elizabeth rises from her bed to fetch water. She finds it impossible to lift the earthenware pot with one hand, and is forced to employ her good hand as a kind of primitive cup and lap from it like a dog. She lurches back to her bed, suddenly, surprisingly, with enough energy left to curse.

  When the man arrives at night—turning on the light she had not bothered to deal with—the curses continue. Elizabeth is shocked at the strength of her abuse. If she could she would poison this unhelpful man with the very pain that had so ignominiously rendered her thus: maddened, prostrate, embracing a cone. The man advances swiftly and places his hand over her mouth.

  Veronica, said my colleague, is additionally the name of the most classic cape movement of the Spanish bullfight. The cape is swung so slowly before the face of the charging bull that it resembles, so it is said, St Veronica’s wiping of the Divine face. A gesture once holy becomes a signal of doom.

  The man has one hand tightly over her cursing mouth and with the other is fumbling at the zip of her jeans. He exposes her thighs and is suddenly upon her, jerking back and forth like an electrical machine. Elizabeth sees the nameless face bobbing rhythmically above, its eyes tightly closed. She feels the pounding of a second pain on this bed more despicable with each passing moment. And then she remembers, as though the very page were still open before her: From the rugged slopes came the sound of cowbells; the peaceful, simple, melodious tintinnabulation came floating unbroken through the quiet, thin, empty air, enhancing the mood of solemnity that broods over the valley heights.

  In the morning our heroine awakens sticky and bruised. Her arm is swollen and festered; she finds the sight of it repulsive. It rests like a dead thing on the stained coverlet.

  Light and dust continue their floating migrations. Elizabeth is alone. She lays placidly listening to the many and various noises, intermittent and continual, human and inhuman, busy and tribal, that drift and enter from outside the window. With no view she re-creates the scene below: she hears a voice she imagines belongs to the woman with the emerald sari, she hears, or thinks she hears, that the older woman is still crying. There is a clatter of knocked pots and a rumble of bullock carts. Minicabs in acceleration. Chickens. Shouts. Religious chimes.

  By afternoon this scene of sounds is so full and reverberative that seeing itself could lend no further corroboration that would make it more real. Thus Elizabeth is changed. Her skin has become caramel, her clothing a sari. She has felt her features remould: a longer nose with a jewel, broader lips, darker eyes, a gloss of black hair. Her body feels irreducibly local and exact; it correlates to its place, is attentive, identified.

  My colleague says with authority: Elizabeth is unoriginal, a cipher, a blank, a mere structure of narrative. But I see her there lying upon the bed, lying just below the duplicitous swastika, substantial, abject, imagining the real, sending her mind up and about like a wisp of whirling dust, becoming explorative, becoming other, almost becoming, one might even say—with all the fraught politics of race in attendant complication—almost becoming Indian.

  Babies

  My sister, the lunatic, beckoned from the back shed with a tightly curled finger.

  See the suns! she whispered. Come and see the suns!

  She had a hucksterish tone that recalled the Easter fair. I remembered men with porous faces and leather money bags who leant repellently close and gestured backwards to bright stalls full of darts games or clown heads or soft furry toys.

  No, I would say firmly, as girl-firm as possible. No.

  My sister, the lunatic, was huckster insistent. She had hooked me with her finger, conspiratorially shrewd.

  Come now, she said. Come and see all the suns.

  Fractionally afraid, hesitant, nervous, I slid slowly forward into the shed’s deep blue shadow, slid into position beside her bedraggled presence, her face the colour of contusions, her insuperable will, and answered in
a single word: Yes!

  It was five years ago that Rose became as she is. During her pregnancy—she was then sixteen and I a mere twelve—she began hearing voices that struggled upwards from her womb and entered volubly and invasively through the back of her head. In those days her face was rather chalk-coloured and gaunt and she carried on her brow the premature curve of a frown, as though acknowledging to the world the authority and the burden of her private chamber of words. She held one-sided conversations and replied to silent questions. She addressed invisible entities in slick polemics. She cajoled and persuaded. She waxed confidently lyrical. She debated, dictated, declaimed and discoursed. Whole dictionaries gathered in her small oval mouth. Dozens of alphabets were daily accomplished. With no skerrick of concision she entered a madwoman’s realm of perpetual, involutional, loud-mouthed pronouncement.

  I remember her sitting for long hours beneath the shade of our trellised grapevine. She was sturdy and still as a monument of granite. Leaf shapes quivered at her pallid face, or slid across the slopes of her bulbous body. And from the animate mouth: word upon word upon word upon word, grape clustered and almost innumerable.

  There were also, of course, certain intervals of silence, certain long autistic stillnesses during which, I presume, Rose listened to her womb words. In these pauses she cocked her head somewhat oddly and distractedly at an angle which implied that the voices were very quiet and that she must strain hard to listen. I wondered as I watched—my appalled fascination growing faster than her belly—whether by an act of will I might also hear the voices that commanded of my sister such strict attention. I began to long for her sounds; I began to covet her correspondents; I began to wish also—lying silent in the dark, listening to her babble bounce out through the night, listening to verbs, adjectives, a whole world full of nouns, tumble, tongue-untied, in wonderful conjugations—I began to wish also for a womb full of words. My jealousy was unspeakable. I lay in my bed feeling ordinary and stupid. I was thin and wordless, unpregnant, plain.

  Then, at last, in the white enamel of moonlight, in the velvet air still invisibly hung with the echoes of her words, she would become exhausted. Rose would turn very slowly the enormous bauble of her body, cease her loud babble, and finally sleep.

  My mother beckoned from her bedroom with a crooked finger. I remember it well.

  Your sister is a lunatic, she firmly pronounced. Unhinged. Unstable. In a state of excess.

  And with those words she turned and led me into her bedroom, a territory usually denied us and thus filled with the sharp specialness of prohibition. To be admitted to my mother’s room was a sign of particular gravity; I knew it only from doorway glimpses, apart from the single occasion—just after my father died—when I was allowed into its centre and almost choked on the concentration of maternal essences: powderscent, knick-knacks, a violet wallpaper grotesquely floral, suffocating dust, flimsy lace curtains, squat china statues, faceted glass bottles, body odours, trinkets, charms of every kind. And beyond all that, altar-like in its presence and wholly commanding, stood an oak dressing-table surmounted in style by a bright three planed mirror which caught and triplicated every girlish trepidation. I had itemised this room through constant recollection and followed my mother inwards to confirm or disconfirm a memory much too vivid to approximate the real. Strangulating tendrils still hung upon the wall, there was still a density of air, a multiplicity of objects, but the whole appeared, over all, rather domestic and subdued, less strange and disturbing than my practised vision. Only the oak dressing-table with its surveilling mirror—a piece of furniture of corpulent and almost Buddhic dimensions—retained any of the original, time-tested power. It sat in the corner with imposing amplitude; I found it fearful.

  My mother moved to the mirror and became suddenly three.

  Sit beside me, she said, patting the narrow vanity stool. I stepped forward to join the company of mothers and daughters, thinking to myself all the while: I am here in her room, she has let me right in, it is less fearful, less large, less an organic entrapment, but there is this triptych of selves, these lustrous faces, this mysterious confrontation. I eyed myself shyly. Each angle showed me timid and unimportant; my mother’s face, by comparison, was impressive and florid and firmly in existence. (I thought of Rose beneath the grape leaves or turning in the moonlight, less a face now than a voluptuous noisy bud of a body.)

  You must not, she began, you must not listen, on any account, to your lunatic sister. Pay no attention, ignore her, walk right away. She is unhinged and unstable. Disturbed. Deranged.

  My mother looked straight ahead and glanced at my image; I thought her quick gaze exceptionally imperious and severe. The glass of the mirror held me still for inspection; I was ensnared and detained in its silver series of verticals. There then ensued a moment of complete, static silence. My mother’s lovely white hands fiddled unconsciously and fastidiously with objects disposed about the dressing-table, a hair brush, a crystal ring case, the edge of a crocheted doily, and then came delicately to rest on a jewellery box of teak inlaid with slivers of ivory.

  I have, she began again, a proposition to make.

  My mother opened the teak box and drew out her jewels. (Ah, the perfection of her fingers! The authority of her gaze arrowing, tangentially, straight for mine!)

  This is a brooch given me by your father in our wedding year. (She held a cluster of tiger eyes set in figured silver.) And this is a necklace which belonged to my dead sister Lily after whom, as you know, you are named in remembrance. (She raised a string of oval garnets, let them dangle and sway.) This here, you see, is my eternity ring (a band of rubies); this chain an heirloom from my maternal grandmother (an ugly cross spiked at the edges and complete with a crucified Jesus).

  At this point I believe I must have ceased to wholly listen. Varieties of gold, corals, Chinese jade, Indian brass, linked swirls of silver, opal ear-rings alike: all were carried from the box and displayed singly and anecdotally. All summoned presences and ghosts, referred to former affections or lost infatuations, coffin-snaffled loves, family tree configurations. I had never before seen such treasure, nor been so much aware of the accoutrements of others.

  And this, she said lastly, is the most special of all.

  My mother raised a small ring of unidentifiable stones: it was a circle of blue gems, interspersed with tiny filigree patterned into leaves.

  This was my own mother’s. I will give it to you if you are still a virgin on your twenty-first birthday.

  The ring was placed in my hand and I felt the sudden, uncomplicated vertigo of desire. It was an exquisite object. It would one day be mine. I glimpsed a fulfilment of expectations of solidity and immanence; I thought the attainment of the ring would place me surely in the net of family continuities, and would also guarantee—as though it were bridal—a definitive release from the realm of girlish inexperience.

  Three mothers nodded in unison in the shiny glass as if reading in my thoughts a contract of souls.

  The baby stayed for eight weeks. Rose kept it in our room, attending to its needs like a legitimate mother. She rose to it at night, changed nappies and suckled. She was calm and competent and moreover continued as garrulous as ever. No change in her condition of unusual fluency—as my mother predicted—had accompanied the birth. No cessation with parturition. No emptying or full-stop. No seizure of the larynx or tying of the tongue. Rose sat beneath the grapevine, now skeletal and stark against the autumn sky, bobbed her new baby in a sort of perpetual mobility, and continued prodigiously to speak.

  As I recollect now there is little to relate. I took scarcely any interest in Rose’s baby; it seemed merely to confirm her own exclusivity and my sad estrangement. She bent close above it, sought its vague stare, played with its tiny, pliable fingers, dressed and undressed its series of pastels, all with a kind of decentred fixation, as though the community of two was little different, in fact, to the community of
one. I once attempted a fumbling aunt’s embrace, more out of curiosity than genuine affection, only to be rebuffed by Rose’s absolute refusal to acknowledge my presence. She simply talked past me, cancelled my brief gesture with a speech to an unseen addressee located somewhere in the space to my left.

  I realise now that I did not comprehend my sister’s speeches. Again and again came a torrent of articulate and sensational gibberish, words of such immediate and bodily power, such sensual investment, that I was giddy with the possibilities of a secret life I imagined Rose to have somehow, mother-defiant, accomplished. I thought for the first time of lovers and nakedness. I began, like her, to cherish the sounds of words, became, like her, a precocious word-hoarder. In puzzlement and enchantment I listened as she daily flung out mouthfuls of polysyllables, spoke on bodies, on babies, on the intricacies of sexual pleasure. And with young-sisterly deference, I acquiesced to her power.

  Yet this was also something of a state of guilt and confusion.

  With the birth Rose had recovered the specificity of her face; her body deflated, and I noticed once again the clear likeness between us. I noticed that we shared the same longish features, the same nut-brown eyes, the same fulsome mouth, the same abundant wayward hair. And this sameness was the basis for a terrible ambiguity: I both loved and feared my lunatic sister. She began to remind me of my mother’s mirror, that there existed a realm of vision—cold, rational, utterly uncircumspect—within which too many of one’s selves may pre-emptively appear.

  Alone I worked to reconsolidate singularity. I remembered the ring of unusual blue stones, its lapidary definitiveness. The inanimate solidity of objects attracted me. Their neutral realm. Their uncarnal equipoise. Their complete autonomy.