David Malouf's An Imaginary Life

III

WHAT HAVE I done?
The Child is lying, still trussed, in a corner of the room opposite me. Since the first occasion the women have refused to touch him. When he fouls himself I must wash him down. They prepare his food, a gruel made of meal and sweetened with honey, but will not cross the threshold of the room. I untie his hands and leave the bowl, listening at the door for him to drag himself over the rushes and sup it up, snuffling like an animal in his hunger. He whimpers but does not cry. His eyes remain dry and nothing like a human sobbing ever comes from him, none of that giving of oneself over to tears that might release the child in him. The whimpering comes from somewhere high in his head and has been learned from one of the animals. He keeps it up for hours on end. To comfort himself, quite shamelessly, as some children suck their thumb, he excites himself with his hand to a series of little shudders, as I have seen monkeys do, then again, and again, till the spasms have exhausted him and he is quiet, squatting in the corner with his knees drawn up sharp and his mouth clenched; or curled up in a ball in the rushes, his knees under his chin, his elbows tight between them.
We spend hours simply staring at one another. And I have no idea what feelings might be at work in him. He shows no sign of interest in anything I do. I write a little. I eat. I mend a tear in my cloak. He stares but does not see. At first when I touched him in the cleaning he tried to bite me with his sharp incisors. Now he accepts all that I do with a passivity that has begun to disturb me. I am afraid we may already have killed something in him. I have a terrible fear that he may die – that what we have brought back here is some animal part of him that can be housed and fed for a while, and kept with us by force, but only till it realizes that the spirit is already gone, having slipped away out of the arms of that first young man who caught and held him; or worse still, having been dreamed out of his body in that first protracted sleep.
I watch him sleep. His limbs twitch like a dog’s, with little involuntary spasms along the inside of the thighs.
Does he dream? If only I could be certain he was dreaming I would know that what I have to contact at last, what I have slowly to lead up through the ladders of being in him, is still there. I must know that he can dream. I must assure myself that he can smile, that he can weep.
But I have not even described him.
He is about eleven years old, tall, strongly but scraggily made, with the elbow and knee joints enlarged and roughly calloused. There are sores on his arms and legs and old scars that appear as discolorations of the flesh, brownish under the yellow tan. The limbs are lightly haired, the chest hairless; but all along the spine there is a hairline, reddish in color like a fox, and it is this that terrifies the women and has made them unwilling to touch him, though the phenomenon is common enough. You may observe it in small children everywhere, as they play naked on doorsteps or splash about in summer under water showers. It usually goes unremarked. Only in this boy has it become, for the women, some sort of sign. That and the feet, which are splayed and hardened from being unshod in all weathers, the toenails worn away, the underside of the foot thickened to a crust as deep perhaps as an earthenware dish, but in no way resembling anything other than a normal foot. The rumor that he is covered with hair and has hooves, which the boy Lullo brings back from the village, is absurd.
I dragged the boy in this evening and made him look at the Child and tell me what he saw. But he was too terrified to look properly, and though he has seen what there is to see, I know he is not convinced. What he imagines is so much more powerful than the facts.
I know what he thinks. He thinks I have somehow bewitched the Child’s hooves into stunted feet to deceive him, or that I have bewitched him.
I had imagined that the boy, being something like the same age as the Child, might have some special interest in him, some special sympathy. But he has none. He regards the Child with loathing, as if he were somehow about to be displaced here by a changeling; as if – is it that? – the Child might, while he was sleeping, steal his spirit. These people believe profoundly in sleepwalkers and stealers of souls. Do they suspect, as I have begun to do, that the Child has lost his spirit, and may, while we see him curled asleep in his corner, be capable, like the shaman, of walking out of his body, through the walls into the next room, and into the boy Lullo’s body while he is absent on one of those dream journeys small boys are accustomed to make, into the hunting woods or out over the river? The old woman and the boy’s mother, I know, are encouraging him in this, because of his influence with the old man. But Ryzak, for what reason I do not know, remains my supporter in the business. Against the women. And against the shaman, who has come only once to examine the Child, and on that occasion refused to sing – another fact that the women mutter over and hold against me. The shaman and the women, of course, are in league.
So all day we sit in the half-dark.
I have come to guess a little of what the Child thinks by examining his features, but at no time have we communicated as before, when we spoke to one another in the woods. It is as if the spirit in him that I spoke to then were no longer present. I watch the mouth with its small, broken teeth. He has a way of drawing his lips back over them and taking the breath in sharp as if he were in pain; though he makes the same gesture, I notice, when he is exciting himself, and it is in this gesture that the odd bone structure is revealed, the high cheekbones, the pointed chin, the lines of the jaw. The eyes too I watch. They are very black, and deep set. The eyebrows tilt upward. The hair, which we have washed and cropped a little, is inky black, straight, and coarse in texture, not at all silky or fine; though this may be because he is undernourished or because his spirit is so low in him, or no longer there at all. I have noticed before how the hair takes on the shine or the dullness of the spirit, especially in the ill. He still seems, for all our scrubbing, less than clean. As if the earth had got so deep into his skin that he has taken on its color. It is perhaps dirt in the old wounds that accounts for the brownish scars on his limbs. He is not at all beautiful, as I had imagined the Child must be. But I am filled with a tenderness, an immense pity for him, a need to free him into some clearer body, that is like a pain in my own.
I think and think. What must the steps be? How should I begin? Kindness, I know, is the way – and time. To reveal to him first what our kindness is, what our kind is; and then to convince him that we belong to the same kind. It is out of this that he must discover what he is.
But we have begun so badly. How can he possibly think of us as anything but cruel? Which of the beasts would have done this to him? Which of the beasts would hunt him down on horseback, truss him up, carry him away from all he has ever known? Then there is the spitefulness of the boy, who I have decided must be kept away. And the hostility of the women.
In the end I must do it all myself. I must, at first, be the only one he has contact with.
I think, strangely, of the wolf in my dream that threatened to consume the whole pool of my being, and begin to be afraid.
The weeks pass.
I no longer leave the room now when the women bring his food. At first he was wary, as if perhaps I had set a trap for him as before. He edged towards the bowl, sniffed, examined it, took it in his hands, and all the while as he ate, more slowly than before, watched me over the rim with his deep black eyes, which seemed these times to have points of red. Then when he had cleaned out the last of the stuff with his finger, he rolled the bowl over the floor and dragged himself back to his corner, where he crouched with his knees up, waiting for me perhaps to make some move. Now he eats without being aware of me. As if I were not there. Grunting as he feeds.
I have also brought my straw pallet into the room, and sleep in the corner opposite him. He has got used to that as well. And I begin to feel again that I have been in contact with him, though it is impossible to know when the contact occurred. It may have been while I was washing him. He submits to that easily enough, though with no sense of his being touched in any part of his real body. It may have been in some chance meeting of the eyes as we pass in and out of each other’s sight. Or it may have been in our sleep, as we move through this room in the same liquid medium, as if floating together in a pool, some casual meeting of one dream with another, a flowing into his sleep, or of his sleep into mine, at some point that the waking mind would not know of. Or in stirring about here, one part of the invisible current I make as I write, as my pen dips in the ink and my hand moves across the parchment, or as I drag the razor over my chin, may have broken against him so that he felt it. Who can tell? But I am certain now that the contact has been made. He no longer whimpers, or rocks back and forth on his knees, making little growls at the back of his throat. He watches. And I begin to believe that something I will have to call his mind has been engaged, and has started to move out into the room. I feel it. It is there after all. It is there. Some process of reaching up out of himself has begun of its own accord.
Today, while I was washing him, he laid his fingertips, with a kind of timid curiosity, on the back of my hand, feeling the texture of the skin – then drew back quickly, as if I might object and punish him. The effect was odd and a little frightening. As if an animal had come up in the dark and touched me with its tongue. Is he beginning to feel at last for some notion of his own being? Is it, for him, like touching his reflection in a glass? Has he, I wonder, any conception of what his own body is, what it looks like, what dimensions it possesses, how it displaces its own small part of the universe? Is it his body he must imagine first, and only after that come to a knowledge of what he is?
There is an intelligence. I feel it. More and more often now, as I settle into some work of my own, writing for example, I am aware of a separate center of energy in the room that disturbs my thoughts, that sets up eddies that beat like waves of light towards me and break against the edge of my consciousness. The room, I know, is filled with emotions that are not mine only, thoughts, not mine, that leap into the still damp atmosphere of a late morning where I sit scribbling and the boy, taut as a spring, watches out of his corner – the beginnings of a restlessness of mind, of body, that is the stirring in him of renewed life.
He is, after all, a child. He needs activity. His body needs to express itself in movement and his mind to reach out and touch and test things.
He has been here now for nearly two weeks. After those first three days when he slept, when his soul tried to bury itself in the earth, and these last days when he has lived in a state of half-sleep, he has begun to move again into wakefulness, into the full alertness of his youth. Yesterday, while I was out of the room briefly, he must have touched my writing materials. The ink was spilled. I sopped it up without giving any indication that I knew he had been tampering with things; refilled the pot; found my place in the roll. And almost burst out laughing to see that his tongue was blue.
Being out of the room again today, I stood just beyond the door frame and watched.
He shuffles across the floor towards the parchment roll and stares at it, pokes at it with his forefinger, then lowers his head and sniffs. How it must puzzle him that the roll still smells of animal hide. Once again the ink fascinates him. He sniffs at that also, but is careful not to spill it. He takes the stylus in his hand, and has been observant enough to grasp it clumsily, but correctly, between thumb and forefinger. He looks pleased with himself. He dips it in the ink, finding great difficulty in getting the pen, balanced as it is between his fingers, into the hole. He crouches over the pot, and there is on his face that look of utterly human concentration that one sees on the faces of small children when they are trying for the first time to draw, or make strokes for writing or thread a needle – the eyes fixed, the tongue pointed at the corner of the mouth and moving with each gesture of the hand, as if it too were one of the limbs we have to use as men, one of our means of pushing out into the world, of moving and changing its objects. Is that perhaps where speech begins? In that need of the tongue to be active in the world, like a hand among objects, grasping, pushing, shaping, remaking?
Watching behind the door these first attempts of the Child to handle the objects of his new world, I find my eyes wet with tears. There is something in our humanity, in the slow initiation of the creatures of our kind into all that we have discovered and made – in ourselves and in the world around us – that is always touching like this; one feels it in the first efforts of the child to push itself upright, to push that one step up that it must have taken our ancestors centuries to imagine and dream of and find limbs for; or in the first precarious placing of one block upon another to make a little tower, the beginnings of a city. All those ages of slow discovery. Relived by the child in just a few months, as he makes use of experience he can never himself have had, and which must lie latent in him, in the lives under his own of thousands long dead, whose consciousness he has somehow brought with him into the world. How much more moving then to see my Child make the discoveries that will lead him, after so many years of exile, into his inheritance, into the society of his own kind.
I have for several days now left his hands free. At last, this morning, I untie all his bonds. They are no longer necessary. All that will tie him to us, to a new life, is invisibly there, he must feel it: the web of feeling that is this room, the strings – curiosity, a need to find out the usefulness to him of all these objects that surround him, and the way they define him and illuminate the uses of his own body – these are the threads that hold him now, and along which his mind must travel to discover how he is connected to us, to the bowl, the water scoop and bucket, the sponge I use to wash him and which he has already begun to use himself, the ink pot, stylus and parchment, the colored ball I have placed casually where his eye cannot miss it, and which, since I never touch it, he must already have realized is his. I feel his mind moving out towards these things. I feel, even in darkness, the invisible twitching of strings.
For some reason, in these long hours of sitting with the Child, watching him move slowly out of himself, trying to imagine myself into his skin so that I will discover how it is I must lead him into his lost childhood, I have found myself more and more often slipping back into my own childhood – also lost until now, or rejected; certainly long forgotten. I fall into some timeless place in myself where the past suddenly reoccurs in all its fullness, or is still in progress. I am there again. I make contact with a self so surprising that I can scarcely believe it is me. I touch again on an experience that I recognize as mine only because its vividness can only be that of life lived in recall. Imagination could not present to the mind, to the senses, anything so poignantly real.
Of course all men put their childhood behind them. It is part of discovering a new self in manhood. But I have done so more than other men, I think. The simplicity of those early years at Sulmo fitted so ill with my new role as man about town, as sophisticated poet of the metropolis, that I should have felt only anxiety and some sense of disgust if I had tried to reconcile the two. For the same reason I found it painful to see my father, who remained disappointed in me – even after my literary reputation might have been enough to make up to him a little for my failure to become a man of affairs. He married again and had another family. And that too made it easy for me to keep away. I lived, after the end of my second marriage, as if I had sprung into the world complete with my first book of poems, an entirely new type, the creature of my own impudent views and with no family behind me, no tribe, no country, no past of any kind.
And now it all comes back to me.
Especially, and with feelings of an extraordinary tenderness such as I have not known for so long now that I cannot recall the last time they can have swept over me, certain evenings from my earliest childhood when we were turned over, my brother and I, to the women of the household, the farm servants, to be washed and dressed for bed, along with their own children, boys and girls both, who are of an age with us and are still at this time (since we have not yet learned to distinguish them as slaves) our playfellows in the farmyard and in the olive groves and orchards beyond.
In the big stone-flagged kitchen under the beams there are tubs of warm water and suds, and we children, perhaps a dozen or more, are splashing about together or paddling in pools on the floor, all shrieking and starting away wherever one of the women, their arms already holding the big fluffy white towels, reaches out and makes a grab for us. It is, to me, a scene of golden beauty and cleanliness. I feel my whole spirit washed at the thought of it: the clean naked bodies, the white towels, the women laughing and holding out their bare wet arms.
In these harvest days we are allowed to sleep out in the farmhouse with our nurse. My mother, who is sickly, and whose head aches with hay fever, has retired to her room and never appears. My father goes out each morning with the harvesters, and if the work is far off on the other side of the valley, he will stay out with the laborers overnight. We are put to bed with the others, on huge straw mattresses behind the kitchen, and lie awake while the women tell us stories about wood spirits and demons older than our Roman gods, who live in odd corners of the house and barn and must be placated with lumps of dough (which they come for in the guise of a mouse) or with herbs that only the oldest and wisest of the women know how to gather, high up in the hills.
This is a woman’s world, which I will never know again. It smells of soapsuds and dough, of curds, of the raw wool I watch the older women carding on a terrace wall in the sun, with the fields behind them a glitter of wings. Early in the morning, almost before it is light, we go out together in a party, women and children, to the water meadows, to gather big orange-yellow mushrooms. I watch the women, who are barefoot, haul their skirts up in the dew while they squat to piss, their heads upright under the straw panniers, and later, on our way home, look on scandalized when, in the stubbled field, they stop and make mocking obeisance to the scarlet-stained figures of Priapus that are set in the midst of the wheat to scare off birds. Back in the yard, there are eggs to gather from under the hens in their wooden houses. There are pigs to feed. There is grain to be winnowed by shaking it in the air in a basketwork sieve. In the coolness of the kitchen, late in the afternoon, there are millet cakes to bake and to prick afterwards with a straw so that they will soak up honey. And then, after dark, the bathing.
I watch again as one of the girls, her skirt hitched up over her bare legs, her arms gleaming wet, takes my brother by the prick and leads him round the tub like a goose, while all the women throw their heads back and laugh, and the children splash and clap their hands and toss suds in the air. And I realize suddenly, nearly fifty years after the event, that this must be the girl my father is sleeping with. I see her lead my brother, the little heir to all this world, round the sopping kitchen floor while the women show their gapped teeth and hold their sides and laugh. It is a vision of utter joyfulness; and I am at the center of it, understanding, for the last time perhaps, a little of its mystery.
It is another world. How strange to find myself back there for odd moments, knowing that I have made nothing of whatever it was that was being revealed to me then – that I went some other way, into a man’s world, into the city, into the state, as my brother too went another way, to death.
But stranger still is that all this time it has remained there, untouched, unrecalled, but still brightly new – and so real that I smell the raw cleanness of it still.
I think also, in these quiet hours, of my brother’s death during the Parilia, just after our birthdays, which fall on the same day.
We have always been close, though our temperaments are so different; he is serious-minded, and filled with a deep sense of loyalty to things, to my father, to the farm, whose every boundary stone he knows, to the family, which is so closely bound up with the country here, the old tribal lands of the Peligni. He is deeply pious, in a way I respect and envy, but having taken on early my role as the frivolous one, I do as I am expected to do, and tease him about it.
For days he lies ill and cannot speak. He is just eighteen. I sit with him in a room off the courtyard, where he lies sweating on a daybed, breaking out in cold shivers, then burning. I read to him a little, but he cannot attend. I hold water to his lips and feel my hand trembling as he drinks. I weep and am ashamed of it. When the day of the Parilia comes I go out heavy-hearted as the twilight gathers to do the duty that is his, to do it for him, as he would do it, and am aware as I cross the yard of the women’s eyes on me, and as I stride out across the fields to where the little fires are already blowing in the dark, I know that if I allow myself even for a moment to believe in the ceremony I am about to perform, as he does, I will have replaced him, made him superfluous, since I will be assuring the gods (who do not exist) that I am there to take his place.
I wade uphill through the yellow grass, hardening my heart, though this in fact is a festival I have always loved, ever since I first went out on my father’s shoulder to watch the fires lit and to see the men’s shadows leaping amongst the corn.
I too know all the boundary stones of our land, but to me they mean something different. They are where the world begins. Beyond them lies Rome and all the known world that we Romans have power over. Out there, beyond the boundary stones, the mystery begins. My mind ventures out, touches the old worn boulders for luck, and then goes on in the dark, populating the unknown with what must be imagined since it cannot be seen. For my brother, I know, the farm and his mind are one. The stones glow at the edge of what he is: these fields that have been cleared of their pebbles and terraced, these ancient olives, with their gnarled trunks so thick that you can hide in them, as the wood spirits do, these vineyards, beehives, slopes of corn streaming with light under the moon. I walk through all this, feeling the grass heads brush my bare legs, and arrive at the field where my father is waiting.
He has already made his course and is drying his body with a cloth. I kiss him. I let a slave loosen my cloak. I sip from the pail of milk. Take in my hand the beanstalk and the ashes of the calf. My father dips a laurel branch in water and sprinkles me with it. He is weeping. My chest, my brow. I blink under the shower of little drops.
The heaps of straw are kindled all the way down the field for me to leap over, and as I sprint away and go flying over the first of them, feeling the rush of air into my lungs, feeling the joy of it, the leaping, the being cleansed and gathered into the web of things, smoke from the straws, dusky twilight, nightjars swooping after insects among the pines, the springing of the young plants under me, I know that it has happened – I have let some grain of belief in all this sprout in my mind, and killed him. My brother is dead. I feel it as a fact in my limbs, in their weariness as I come round to the start, in my own breathlessness as I lean forward, hands on hips, and gasp for air. I feel it, guiltily, in the glow that comes to my body after the exercise. I have run my brother’s death. When they sprinkle me a second time with the laurel and I start back across the darkening fields, feeling my sweat dry in the breeze, it is to what I know has already occurred. I stop at the entrance to the yard and listen for the first wailings from the house, and hear them, the women’s voices. Sitting at the edge of the field, in the dark, I loosen my sandals. I strew my shoulders, my legs, my hair, with earth and know obscurely what it is I am about. I am trying to wipe out the purification that was his, I am atoning for my own moment of belief.
So these things happen, deep in our lives. We do not speak of them. We hide them even from ourselves, but they do not leave us. For all our mockery of the earth we have come from, it covers us, we creep back to it, to its thickness on our limbs, its grit in our mouths. I killed something in myself on that night and tried to cover it with earth. Now it cries out in me again. I find myself wishing that I could talk to my father once more, after all these years of estrangement, and tell him that I have found my way back to that country I will never see again and am at home. I have admitted at last its claims upon me. I know where I was born.
And that brings my mind back, as always, to the Child. What is his country? What is his parentage? At what moment did he push out into the world, under what star sign, with what planet in the ascendant, in what ephemeris of the moon? And if he does not know these things can he ever know who he is or what his fate is to be?
Or does not knowing make him free?
Each morning now we go out, the Child and I, to practice our lessons in the open, where the boy and the women of the house cannot listen.
The Child carries the colored ball, which has become his talisman, his first possession among us; he never lets it go. In sleep he curls up around it. While eating he places it in the crook of his knee as he squats cross-legged with the bowl in his lap, handling awkwardly, at last, the wooden spoon I have taught him to use. When we are out walking he carries the ball in his left hand.
I avoid the places where we are likely to come across people from the village: women beating their clothes on the pebbles or laying them out to dry in the thornbrush; men driving their ox ploughs to the narrow fields at the edge of the stockade where our meager crop of oats is grown.
I avoid too the little grove to the west which is sacred to the women, and where at certain phases of the moon they sacrifice to Hecate with the entrails of a dog.
This leaves only the swampy land towards the river.
I take off my sandals (the boy goes barefoot, and bare except for a loose robe, which he tears off as soon as we are out of sight of the village) and we wade through the rushes to a turfy island covered with scrub and a few stalks of wild oats; and there, each morning, with the swamp birds invisible around us, creaking and calling, or climbing heavily into the watery sky, and the frogs tinkling, we begin.
I am teaching the Child to speak.
It is a difficult process. I have long since discovered on our expeditions together that he can imitate any of the birds or animals we come across, and he delights in showing off to me how he can whistle like the big hawks we see occasionally floating high up under the clouds or throw his voice, pic pic, against the bole of a tree, like the woodpeckers of my childhood, the sacred spirits of our Sulmo countryside. He stands with his feet apart, hands on hips, head held back to the light, and his lips contort, his features strain to become those of the bird he is mimicking, to become beak, crest, wattles, as out of his body he produces the absolute voice of the creature, and surely, in entering into the mysterious life of its language, becomes, for a moment, the creature itself, so that to my eyes he seems miraculously transformed.
Sometimes he uses his hands like an instrument to trill and flute, blowing across his fist and fluttering his fingers. At other times the cry simply floats out of him, high and clear, or the warbling comes from deep in his throat, a guttural murmuring, or his body suddenly gives forth a metallic creaking so that I am startled by its closeness. It is as if each of the various bird species – ground pigeons, crows, waders, high-flying migratory birds that have been who knows where over the horizon – had their life in him and could be drawn out on the breath between his lips; as if he had some entrance to their mysterious comings and goings among the grasses, or had been with them to the bottom of the river where the water birds dive after their prey, or in the high places of the air where imagination fails to follow them or to catch with the ear how their cries are translated at the margin of the stars.
Observing how he makes these sounds, and the sound of frogs, cicadas, rabbits, the low growl of wolves and their fearful baying, I get some clue at last to how he may be taught to speak.
His whole face is contorted differently as he assumes each creature’s voice. If he were to speak always as frog or hawk or wolf, the muscles of his throat and jaw might grow to fit the sound, so intimately are the creatures and the sounds they make connected, so deeply are they one. It is through the structure of his own organs of speech then that he must learn to communicate. If I can reveal to him their physical shape he will discover their use.
For this reason, as I make the sounds I want him to imitate, and which he finds such difficulty in drawing up to his lips, I place his fingers on my throat so that he can hear the buzzing of my voice there, I lay his fingertips to my lips so that he can feel the shape of them, the flow of breath. Gradually, one sound at a time, we are finding human speech in him. It is a game he delights in. He is childishly eager to show me that he can imitate me as well as the creatures. With his fingertips at my lips, his brow furrowed, listening, he discovers the shape of his own lips, and the sound is almost perfect. He takes his hands from my throat and places them on his own, and laughs outright when he feels at last the same buzzing there and hears the sound; astonished at first, as if he didn’t know where it came from, then jubilant, making the same sound over and over again in his triumph, with little whoops between.
I have begun to understand him. In imitating the birds, he is not, like our mimics, copying something that is outside him and revealing the accuracy of his ear or the virtuosity of his speech organs. He is being the bird. He is allowing it to speak out of him. So that in learning the sounds made by men he is making himself a man. Speech is the essential. I have hit at the very beginning on the one thing that will reveal to him of what kind he is. In making those buzzing sounds he discovers his throat. In intoning through his nostrils he realizes that he has a nose, and behind it, caverns where the sound reverberates. And so on for lips, tongue, teeth. As he builds up the whole range of sounds that we make, he is building up in his own head the image of head, checking and rechecking with his fingertips against my throat, my jaws, my lips, that he is made as I am, that he is man.
But what head is it that his imagination is creating?
What is it, finally, that I can lead him to imagine and then to become?
And having built up the whole repertory of sounds, what language am I to teach him?
Meanwhile we proceed with simple manual skills. I teach him to throw and catch the ball. He is quick at this and at all body skills and soon begins to play tricks on me, perceiving that I am neither as quick of eye nor as sure of hand and foot as he is. I teach him to cast a javelin, to thread and use a needle. He himself tries to hold a stylus and make marks with it. Strangest of all, he has learned to smile. Not simply to laugh in response to some clumsiness of mine as I dart about after the ball, but to smile, as we do, out of some state of his own soul, a sudden lighting up of the spirit in him that has no object and no cause. He also assumes, on our walks, the role of teacher, pointing out to me tracks in the grass and explaining with signs or gestures of his body, or with imitation sounds, which bird or beast it is that has made them. Or finding under the mold of a log a grub or chrysalis, he explains with his hands how it will be a moth, acting out in a kind of dance its transformation.
All this world is alive for him. It is his sphere of knowledge, a kind of library of forms that he has observed and committed to memory, another language whose hieroglyphs he can interpret and read. It is his consciousness that he leads me through on our walks. It flickers all around us: it is water swamps, grass clumps, logs, branches; it is crowded with a thousand changing forms that shrill and sing and rattle and buzz, and must be, in his mind, like the poems I have long since committed to memory, along with the names of a thousand gods and their fables, the rules of rhetoric, theorems, the facts of science, the facts of history, the theories of the philosophers. Only for him it is a visible world he can walk through, that has its weathers and its seasons, its cycle of lives. He leads me into his consciousness and it is there underfoot and all about me. How can I ever lead him into mine?
I have come to a decision. The language I shall teach the Child is the language of these people I have come among, and not after all my own. And in making that decision I know I have made another. I shall never go back to Rome.
No doubt I will go on writing to my wife and my attorney. I shall even go on addressing Augustus, begging him to forgive my crimes and recall me. Because in one-half of my life that is what is expected of me, it is the drama I must play out to its conclusion. But in the other half of my life I know that if the letter came, recalling me, I would not go. More and more in these last weeks I have come to realize that this place is the true destination I have been seeking, and that my life here, however painful, is my true fate, the one I have spent my whole existence trying to escape. We barely recognize the annunciation when it comes, declaring: Here is the life you have tried to throw away. Here is your second chance. Here is the destiny you have tried to shake off by inventing a hundred false roles, a hundred false identities for yourself. It will look at first like disaster, but is really good fortune in disguise, since fate too knows how to follow your evasions through a hundred forms of its own. Now you will become at last the one you intended to be.
So I admit openly to myself what I have long known in my heart. I belong to this place now. I have made it mine. I am entering the dimensions of my self.
How all this has begun to happen is a mystery to me. It begins at first, perhaps, in our dreams. Some other being that we have kept out of mind, whose thoughts we have never allowed to come to the tip of our tongue, stirs and in its own way begins to act in us. A whole hidden life comes flooding back to consciousness. So it is that my childhood has begun to return to me. Not as I had previously remembered it, but in some clearer form, as it really was; which is why my past, as I recall it now, continually astonishes me. It is as if it had happened to someone else, and I were being handed a new past, that leads, as I follow it out, to a present in which I appear out of my old body as a new and other self.
So too, in my lessons with the Child. When I try to articulate what I know, I stumble suddenly on what, till that moment, I did not know. There are times when it comes strongly upon me that he is the teacher, and that whatever comes new to the occasion is being led slowly, painfully, out of me.
We are moving in opposite directions, I and the Child, though on the same path. He has not yet captured his individual soul out of the universe about him. His self is outside him, its energy distributed among the beasts and birds whose life he shares, among leaves, water, grasses, clouds, thunder – whose existence he can be at home in because they hold, each of them, some particle of his spirit. He has no notion of the otherness of things.
I try to precipitate myself into his consciousness of the world, his consciousness of me, but fail. My mind cannot contain him. I try to imagine the sky with all its constellations, the Dog, the Bear, the Dragon and so on, as an extension of myself, as part of my further being. But my knowing that it is sky, that the stars have names and a history, prevents my being the sky. It rains and I say, it rains. It thunders and I say, it thunders. The Child is otherwise. I try to think as he must: I am raining, I am thundering, and am immediately struck with panic as if, in losing hold of my separate and individual soul, in shaking the last of it off from the tip of my little finger, I might find myself lost out there in the multiplicity of things, and never get back.
But I know now that this is the way. Slowly I begin the final metamorphosis. I must drive out my old self and let the universe in. The creatures will come creeping back – not as gods transmogrified, but as themselves. Beaked, furred, fanged, tusked, clawed, hooved, snouted, they will settle in us, re-entering their old lives deep in our consciousness. And after them, the plants, also themselves. Then we shall begin to take back into ourselves the lakes, the rivers, the oceans of the earth, its plains, its forested crags with their leaps of snow. Then little by little, the firmament. The spirit of things will migrate back into us. We shall be whole.
Only then will we have some vision of our true body as men.
So day by day, as I teach the Child to put sounds together and make words such as men use, he teaches me to make the sounds of the birds and beasts.
At first it was a game I allowed to humor him. My self-consciousness, the awkwardness of my attempts, made him laugh, and that in itself, the sudden breaking out of the child in him, delighted me, and the notion that we were both playing the same game made it easier for me to keep him involved in the long, slow, difficult task I have set him.
But he, in fact, is the more patient teacher. He shows me the bird whose cry I am trying to imitate. He makes me hold it, trembling in my hands. I know what he intends. I am to imagine myself into its life. As the small, soft creature beats its warmth into me, I close my human mind and try to grow a beak, try to leap up out of myself, defying the heaviness of my own flesh, the solid bones, and imagine what it is to soar out of the wet grass towards the clouds. A strange piping comes from my throat, small bird cries, and the Child clasps his hands and makes the sound himself, encouraging me, bringing me closer to it, the simple scale that is the bird’s individual being.
And it is true. Each day brings me closer. Once, in the early days of my desolation, I thought I might learn to write in the language of the spiders. Now, led by the Child, I am on my way to it. The true language, I know now, is that speech in silence in which we first communicated, the Child and I, in the forest, when I was asleep. It is the language I used with him in my childhood, and some memory, intangibly there but not quite audible, of our marvelous conversations, comes to me again at the very edge of sleep, a language my tongue almost rediscovers and which would, I believe, reveal the secrets of the universe to me. When I think of my exile now it is from the universe. When I think of the tongue that has been taken away from me, it is some earlier and more universal language than our Latin, subtle as it undoubtedly is. Latin is a language for distinctions, every ending defines and divides. The language I am speaking of now, that I am almost speaking, is a language whose every syllable is a gesture of reconciliation. We knew that language once. I spoke it in my childhood. We must discover it again.
The season begins to change. Already when we go out these days, to our island in the swamp, I have to wrap up against the wind, which for nearly a month now has blown steadily from the north, though the Child still goes naked, and seems unaffected either by wind or cold. Shadows gather out of the scrub earlier and earlier each day. The light is grayish. The birds who have been our companions out there begin to flock away. Each day there are fewer of them and at dusk, making our way back across the flat watery landscape, we hear the geese flocking south, great waves of them beating across the sky and filling the heights with their honking cry. The beasts have crawled away into the earth to sleep. I feel a slowing in the Child also, and half believe that the secret of his winter survival will be revealed at last. One morning I shall find that he too has taken himself away into some deeper sleep, like the one that filled those first three days after we found him.
Meanwhile the village is being turned into a fort. Men are out in groups repairing the stockade. The last of the harvest has been brought in and garnered. The byres that are open and empty all summer are being stocked with feed, and in a few weeks now, the beasts will be led in, the oxen, cows, asses, goats, to be stabled under the rooms where we sleep, and when I climb down in the morning there will be their warm breath in the darkness there, the smell of their stale, the sound of their nuzzling and feeding. The yard is piled high with stacks of square-cut peat, and wagons laden with it rumble up the lanes between the huts, with men – or more often half-naked children – yelling and switching the oxen to encourage them uphill through the oozing mud. We are preparing to shut ourselves in. Against the horsemen from the north, who will surely appear again as the river freezes, and against the wolves. In each one of us there is this sense of withdrawal into ourselves, this retirement into the body’s secret light and warmth, out of the coming cold; this moving further into some deep inner self that must remain untouched by the closeness that will be forced upon us in these winter months, when first the town is shut up, then our houses, and except for snatches of duty on the walls, we will spend the days and nights equally, huddled together above the one peat stove in the big central room over the byre. Winter here is a time of slow-smoldering resentments, of suspicion, of fantasies that grow as the days move deeper into the year’s darkness and the cold drives us closer together and yet further apart.
I am anxious, especially, for the Child. Up till now we have lived apart from the family in my summer outhouse, not quite separate, since the room adjoins the main sleeping rooms of the hut, but able at least to come and go as we please and to see as little of the others as the smallness of our compound allows. I realize, now, how much in these last weeks I have cut myself off, how much I have made my life with the Child the entire limits of my world. Now all that is at an end. My little outhouse will be turned over to the spiders. A week after the first snow it will be all but buried. How will the Child endure our being cooped up in a single room? Will the women, and the boy, accept him?
I mention my anxieties to old Ryzak as we sit, in the late light of the courtyard, over a game these people play with a wooden tablet and pegs.
He is winning as usual, and trying, with his down-drawn mouth and moustache, which he strokes with a stubby forefinger, not to look pleased with himself, though I am too poor a player to offer much challenge. He pretends to find a puzzle where there is none, wags his finger at me, and makes his move.
‘No no, my friend, you must trust me. They will not trouble the boy.’
But I am not convinced. I am inclined to think that for all his position as headman, and for all his quiet assumption of authority, Ryzak holds less sway over the village than he would have me believe, and less sway, also, over the house. Behind his male prerogative, established in law, lies the darker power of the women. The old woman his mother, especially, has a strange ascendancy over him. He shouts at her, and once or twice I have seen him strike her. But his spirit quails before hers, I feel it. In some darker area of belief, it is her demons, the old spirits she mutters to under her breath and sacrifices to by moonlight, who are the powerful beings of this world, and Ryzak knows it. He is scared of her magic, as he is scared also of the shaman. All he has on his side is bodily strength and the authority, such as it is, of the law.
The old woman remains hostile and suspicious. I watch her lips move as she ladles our gruel into bowls, and wonder whether she is simply talking to herself or muttering spells. She has a great reputation in the village as a worker of enchantments, and scarcely a day passes without the village women calling to consult with her on the question of a strawberry mark, or a harelip, or a difficult birth. I have even, on one or two occasions, seen a young man come lurking about, shifting from foot to foot at the gate as he prepares to submit himself to the dangerous world of women’s magic. Seeking no doubt a love philter or a charm against mildew or the early dropping of his lambs. She is sometimes to be glimpsed, when we got out to our island, gathering herbs among the wormwood scrub or reading messages out of places in a field where the grass forms circles made neither by beast nor man. I know that she spies on me. She believes, I think, that I am some sort of rival wizard – is that what poet means to her? – who is using the Child to make a different and more potent magic. Her mutterings over our gruel are meant to sing the goodness out of the grains, so that our spirits will find no nourishment in them. But she is too wary of her son to practice directly against us.
Her ally in all this is the boy, Lullo. He is jealous, I know, because he has been replaced as my pupil – though I have several times offered to return to our lessons. He refuses to come near me, and proclaims loudly that he has no use for Latin or for the simple mathematics I have tried to teach him.
The old man looks rueful. He would like his grandson to acquire these accomplishments but cannot, out of pride, allow any suggestion of his own deficiency. Silently, with his leathery features puckered up in an expression of clownish apology and helplessly affronted dignity, he begs me not to be insulted by the boy’s impudence, to sympathize, if I can, with his difficulty. He tells Lullo he is a lout, and cuffs his ear; but gently, and with the suggestion that in choosing loutishness, he is remaining loyal to his own people, and especially, to his uncivilized but unloutish grandfather. The boy accepts the blow as it is intended, with a superior smile in my direction, and swaggers off.
Ryzak shakes his head, makes a mouth, shows me the palms of his hands. The old woman, magnificently justified, celebrates my defeat with a squawk of triumph, and scuttles off to prepare an infusion of herbs in boiled water which she serves with a pantomime of such insolent and exaggerated politeness that Ryzak feels bound to declare the tea undrinkable, and tosses the bowls and their contents into the yard.
Only the boy’s mother is too good-natured to have turned entirely against me. She has always considered me some sort of fool whose masculine weakness she ought to indulge. Her humorous affection goes back to my earliest days here, when she tried to teach me the names of the seeds she was sorting; and since she is afraid of the old woman, she is glad of my presence because I am a thorn in the old crone’s side. It is she who brings the water for my little plants. It is, I recognize, the subversive act of one who also exists in this house by a sort of uneasy tolerance and who sees in me another like herself.
She comes from a distant village and is of a different race. Her only real hold on this house, now that her husband is dead, is through her son. Or rather, it would be, if Ryzak were not so inordinately fond of her. The old woman, no doubt, puts this down as another mark against him, another of those little softnesses that weaken the structure of things.
It is, perhaps, a similar weakness that makes the young woman, despite the old woman’s warnings and her own fear, reach out sometimes and touch the Child as he is stooped over one of his tasks. Softly, and for the merest second, drawn by curiosity, or tenderness, or some impulse to put herself in contact with whatever force it is that is compacted in him, she strokes his hair, starting back the moment he feels her hand. But for that moment, brief as it is, the look on their faces is extraordinary.
I mean to say only that our lives here, even in separation, are alive with tension. And the winter has just begun.
All day today there has been that peculiar stillness in the air, that sickly greenish light that promises snow. Huge curdled clouds over the sea. The animals, who have already been brought indoors, are restless in their stalls, stamping and smoking, or shifting together in the dark. The Child too has been unwilling to settle to our tasks. Like any boy of his age, he can be difficult, and is forever on the lookout for excuses – a kingfisher’s wing in the swamp, a grub crawling over a log – to divert my attention. But today it is different. All his muscles remain tense, alert, as if he heard a footfall in the grass behind us. He cannot settle his mind on things, and once or twice he shows little bursts of temper, impatiently pushing my hand away and cocking his head as if the language I am trying to teach him were blocking out another that his ears must be especially sharp to catch.
He is often attuned like this to the shifts of weather. He can smell a change of wind hours before the first breath of it shivers the sea or lifts the marram grass of the swamp. I see him abruptly sit upright in the yard, lift his head, as if at a sudden presence, and know that outside the grass-blades will be swaying in the first cool gust of a new wind, or that the first flickers of lightning will be at play far off on the northern skyline.
But today it is the snow, which we have been expecting now for nearly three weeks. In the fort they are making final preparations. All over the flat gray land the stillness vibrates as if a string had been struck. Everything hums in sympathy.
Sometime between midnight and dawn I am woken by a strange light in the room, an unnatural blue that pulses, not at all like moonlight. The door to the hut is open, and the Child’s place in the corner is empty. I get up quickly, and am struck with fear.
But he has not run away. In all that dazzle of light off the snow that must have been falling for hours it is so deep, he is standing naked in the yard (he sleeps naked, even now, when the rest of us have to wrap up in fur) and seems to me to be asleep still – he has that remote entranced look of sleepwalkers, who even when they pass you in a corridor, or on stairs, seem untouchably beyond reach, as if they were moving in some other and equally present world that is separated from ours, but not by walls. He stands perfectly still, with his face raised to the sky, which is of an incandescent blueness, neither of night nor of day, a blueness that sings, it is so clear, so pure, so absolutely its own color.
He stands like that, still in the cold, with the light striking up off the snow, for nearly an hour. I am too scared to wake him. Then when the first light flakes begin to fall again, he opens his mouth to them, rubs his face, his shoulders, his torso, then holds his arms out and his head up so that the light falls directly upon them.
I make a little sound, of shuffling perhaps, since I too have been standing still in the cold, afraid to move lest I disturb him.
He turns and is suddenly awake. Smiles. Lets out a whoop. And begins leaping about in the snow, throwing handfuls of it into the air. He seems unaware of the cold. His body keeps its color, his hands and feet are unnumbed. When he comes scrambling towards me with a handful of crushed snow I can feel the warmth he is giving out, his body glows, he is a furnace. He shows me the snow as if it were something out of his own world that I might never have seen.
But when I try to draw him back into the room he resists. I have never known him so suddenly recalcitrant. I make the mistake of insisting, and he lashes out at me, spitting, tearing at my cloak, and runs to the wall of the stockade, scratching at the raw timber in his attempt to scale it. When I try to calm him he hurls me off and begins to howl. It is the old howling from his days in the forest. He howls, scratching at the wall like an animal, spitting whenever I approach, showing me his teeth and his hands with all the fingers tense and extended like claws. Behind me, the women. And Ryzak, looking alarmed. And the sleepy boy, with his eyes wide open as if one of the old man’s stories had suddenly come alive in the yard.
I am on the edge of tears. There is nothing to be done. I wait, with Ryzak, for the Child to exhaust himself. He sinks against the wall at last, with his nails bloody, and I am filled with pity for him, and with a terrible feeling suddenly of guilt; but I cannot touch him. All these weeks I have been following my own plan for the Child, and have never for one moment thought of him as anything but a creature of my will, a figure in my dream. Now, as he kneels in the snow, howling, tearing his face with his nails, I have a vision of his utter separateness that terrifies me. I have no notion of what pain it is he is suffering, what deep sense of loss and deprivation his cries articulate. At last when the howling has subsided to a weak and childlike sobbing, we carry him to his pallet and I huddle at his side, with the door closed, in the dark, till he has sobbed himself asleep.
In the morning he seems to have no memory of the night’s events. He watches from his corner while I roll up my bedding, pack my writing materials, my razor and bowl, preparing for a season to abandon this space that is mine – ours – for the common room over the byre. I assure him with gestures that I am not leaving without him and encourage him to get his own things together, such as they are: the rough gown he refuses to wear, his colored ball. But he seems unable to wake properly. He watches while I sweep out the room and, saying goodbye to the spiders, bar the door behind me. By the end of the week snow will have buried our hut, and after that, when it freezes, there will be no getting back inside save through the roof.
Slowly, with all our belongings, we climb the ladder inside the byre to the upper room.