David Malouf's An Imaginary Life

V

NO MORE DREAMS. We have passed beyond them into the last reality.
The grasslands, under the first touch of spring, sway and ripple like the sea, so that wading through them, swimming at times through the chest-high grass heads, is more like floating than walking, with no landmark as far as the eye can see. Above, an immensity of blue sky, and only the smallest, far-off clouds as ceiling.
Back there in the scrublands beyond the river this lack of objects for the eye to focus on seemed like deprivation of the spirit, and I spent my whole time longing for something to break the skyline, one of the slim dark cypresses of my home country, or a chestnut with the sun pouring through it, making every big leaf transparent, a luminous green. Here the immensity, the emptiness, feeds the spirit, and leaves it with no hunger for anything but more space, more light – as if one had suddenly glimpsed the largeness, the emptiness of one’s own soul, and come to terms with it, glorying at last in its open freedom.
So one moves here as in another atmosphere. It is as if the very air were different, thinner in the head, as it can be at times on mountaintops. Even my bones seem lighter. And though I am tired almost beyond tiredness by these long days of pushing north into the sky, my body feels almost no ache, only a kind of remoteness from itself. I feel sometimes as if I were moving on two separate planes. I see us as from a great height, two tiny figures parting the grassland with a shadowy crease as we move through it, like swimmers; and from that height the body’s tiredness is as nothing. The physical ache is there but it cannot be felt over such a distance, as a cry for example, from so far-off, could not be heard. The spirit experiences what the body does but in a different form. It does not move along a line with the body, northward, dividing the grasses’ light. It expands to become the whole landscape, as if space itself were its dimensions; filling the whole land from horizon to horizon and the whole arch of sky, its quality now the purest air, a myriad particles of light, each one a little center from which the whole can be grasped at a single glance, and from whose vantage point, above, I see those tiny figures crawling, who are the Child and myself. From a point far ahead I see us approaching. From a point a whole day’s distance behind us, I see us moving away.
At evening big shadows move over the hills, dipping into the hollows and deepening their slopes, which are gentle enough when we come to them. On still days there is only the sound of wings, the clicketing of insects all about us, as they cluster at the grass roots or flicker in the air. When the north wind blows it freezes, and the whole landscape seethes. We crawl in then, like insects, under the roots, and let the great sea roll over us. But when the south wind blows it is warm with the first breath of spring. And already, everywhere about us, are the signs of spring: little wild flowers deep in the grass, grubs that the Child gathers, and which we feed upon, the first of the birds that come flocking back to the ripening grass heads – great clouds of them ballooning in the sky, falling like a low cloud over the uplands, suddenly streaming out before us in a funnel shape as our wading into their universe disturbs them as they feed.
This is the Child’s world at last. He plunges through it joyfully, dragging me after, and on all sides finding little surprises that he leaps upon like objects he has mislaid and expected never to find again. He brings me birds eggs, holding them gently cupped in his hand, pointing out the speckles and making little cries to tell me which bird it is. And occasionally, out of a clutch of six or seven, he will give me one to suck, pushing a grass stalk through each end and showing me how to draw the goodness out. He gives me seeds to eat, and straws to munch on. He finds roots that are sweet, and tubers, digging them up with his nails and cleaning them off with a thumb to make them ready for me to chew and swallow when I can, demonstrating, with his strong teeth, how they can be stripped and pounded to a pulp and the stringy fibers rejected. He finds a kind of mallow with a drop of honey in the horn, and holds his head back, pointing his tongue to take the single sticky dollop of it, and laughs when I try to do the same. His eyes are everywhere, as we walk, for whatever is edible and will sustain us.
The days pass, and I cease to count them. The river is far behind us.
Occasionally, far-off on one of the hilltops, we see horsemen, and watch the grasses part and darken as they ride downhill – towards what? We never know. Nor do we ever see anyone closer.
Once or twice in the night I wake to find the Child sitting stark upright beside me, listening. I hear nothing, but know what it is. There are wolves close by. When one of them approaches he rises softly, stands tall in the dark, and makes little growling sounds in his throat, and I see the wolf’s eyes flash greenish as it lopes away.
I no longer ask myself where we are making for. The notion of a destination no longer seems necessary to me. It has been swallowed up in the immensity of this landscape, as the days have been swallowed up by the sense I now have of a life that stretches beyond the limits of measurable time. Is this what the shaman experiences when he sets off from the circle he has drawn with his own hand, and where his body squats? – this venturing out into a space that has no physical dimensions, and into a time that may be, in human terms, just a few minutes but is also eternity. Is this the land his spirit passes over on its way towards the pole? And is that what lies on the far side of this grassy plain? The pole? Is that where we are going, the Child and I? How long does it take to get there? In whose trance am I making this journey? And who is my companion?
I ask myself that now, watching him move in the light just a few feet from me, naked, as he has been all these last days, poised in the stillness, half rising on one foot with his whole body alert to whatever it is that is in the grass beyond – who is he, this Child who leads me deeper into the earth, further from the far, safe place where I began, the green lands of my father’s farm, further from the last inhabited outpost of the known world, further from speech even, into the sighing grasslands that are silence? Where has he come from? Out of which life? Out of which time? Did I really discover him out there in the pinewoods, or did he somehow discover me, or rediscover me, out of my own alienation from the world of men? Is he the Child of my first days under the olive trees at Sulmo? Is it the same Child? Is there, after all, only one? And where is he leading me, since I know at last that it is he who is the leader, he now who is inducting me into the mysteries of a world I have never for a moment understood. Wandering along together, wading through the high grasses side by side, is a kind of conversation that needs no tongue, a perfect interchange of perceptions, moods, questions, answers, that is as simple as the weather, is in fact the merest shifting of cloud shadows over a landscape or over the surface of a pool, as thoughts melt out of one mind into another, cloud and shadow, with none of the structures of formal speech. It is like talking to oneself. Like one side of the head passing thoughts across to the other, and knowing in a kind of foreglow, before the thought arrives, what it will be, having already received the shadow of its illumination.
I am growing bodiless. I am turning into the landscape. I feel myself sway and ripple. I feel myself expand upwards toward the blue roundness of the sky. Is that where we are going?
The earth, now that I am about to leave it, seems so close at last. I wake, and there, so enormous in their proximity to my eyeball that I might be staring through tree trunks into an unknown forest, are the roots of the grass, and between the roots, holding them together, feeding them, the myriad round grains of the earth, so minute, so visible, that I suddenly grasp the process by which their energy streams up through the golden stems. They are almost transparent, these fine long stalks. One can stare right through them and see the sap mounting in bubbles. They are columns of light, upright channels by which the earth feeds itself to the sky. And at their summit, so far-off they seem unreachable, the feathery grass heads plumping and nodding in the breeze, into whose sweet seeds all the richness of the earth ascends.
Round the base of these roots, seeking refuge amongst them as in a forest, finding food, are the smaller creatures – wood lice, ants, earwigs, earthworms, beetles, another world and another order of existence, crowded and busy about its endless process of creation and survival and death. We have come to join them. The earth’s warmth under me, as I stretch out at night, is astonishing. It is like the warmth of another body that has absorbed the sun all day and now gives out again its store of heat. It is softer, darker than I could ever have believed, and when I take a handful of it and smell its extraordinary odors I know suddenly what it is I am composed of, as if the energy that is in this fistful of black soil had suddenly opened, between my body and it, as between it and the grass stalks, some corridor along which our common being flowed. I no longer fear it. I lie down to sleep, and wonder if, in the looseness of sleep, I mightn’t strike down roots along all the length of my body, and as I enter the first dream, almost feel it begin to happen, feel my individual pores open to the individual grains of the earth, as the interchange begins. When I wake I am entirely reconciled to the process. I shall settle deep into the earth, deeper than I do in sleep, and will not be lost. We are continuous with earth in all the particles of our physical being, as in our breathing we are continuous with sky. Between our bodies and the world there is unity and commerce.
Perhaps that is why the breaking of the earth around us into the newness of spring seems, this time around, to be occurring at the very end of my nerves. The furriness of the little round catkins we discover on occasional bushes, the stickiness of new leaves that begin as a glossy finial and suddenly unfold out of themselves as tiny serrated heart shapes, all this, at such close range, seems miraculous, and so too is the exploding into the air of so many wings. A membrane strains and strains, growing transparent, till the creature who is stirring and waking in there is visible in all its parts, forcing its own envelope of being towards the breaking point till with its folded wings already secure in the knowledge of flight, and of all the motions of the air, it flutters free. The whole earth creaks and strains in the darkness. The sounds are tiny, but to an ear that has been laid close to the earth, entirely audible. I think sometimes that if I were to listen hard enough I would hear my own body breaking forth in the same way, pushing at the thin, transparent envelope that still contains it, that keeps it from bursting forth into whatever new form it has already conceived itself as being, something as different from what we know as the moth is from the chrysalis.
The Child too seems to me to have a new being out here, and I no longer ask myself what harm I may have done him. He too has survived his season among men. Some new energy is in him. He is lighter. He moves faster over the earth. He is alert to every shift of the wind and mood of the sky as it carries the weather of tomorrow and the day after towards us, to every scent of the hundred grasses and herbs and fat little buds that spread around us their invisible particles. It is these grasses and their parasites, the worms, the grubs, the small winged grasshoppers, that provide us with nourishment. The Child gathers them where they hang, feeding in their chains above the earth, one creature grazing, taking in goodness, and passing on into another’s mouth. We are at the end of the chain. Each day early, the Child hunts, feeding me now out of his world as I once fed him out of ours.
I watch him standing, at dusk, at the edge of whatever place we have found to rest for the night, staring out northward into the immensity of grass.
Does he know what lies out there? Is he returning to some known place, and leading me there? Each day now I have less and less strength to push on towards whatever goal it is – unannounced yet, among the miles of grass – that we are headed for. Does he know where he is taking us? I feel his impatience to be moving, even as he stands at dusk, perfectly still against the reddening sky, casting his eye forward to where we will be, at the crest of that further rise, at this time tomorrow night. I watch him, and wonder what it is in his mind that gives our journey purpose. His whole body strains toward some distance that I cannot grasp from where I lie in the shade. He is full of it, of some suppressed passion for the furthest reaches of what he can see, and I feel that, glowing in him, as he stoops to bring me whatever he has found for us to eat, patiently sorting seeds for me, or showing me how to tackle water snails, or squeezing drops of water out of a piece of rag to wet my lips. He seems closer now than I ever thought possible. In those early days it seemed inconceivable that he should discover in himself this tender kinship with men that is visible now in every moment of his concern for me.
And yet for all this closeness, he seems more and more to belong to a world that lies utterly beyond me, and beyond my human imagining.
It is as if he moved simultaneously in two separate worlds. I watch him kneel at one of his humble tasks, feeding me, or cleaning up my old man’s mess. And at the same time when I look up, he is standing feet away, as when I first saw him in the pinewood, a slight, incandescent figure, naked against the dusk, already moving way from me in his mind, already straining forward to whatever life it is that lies out there beyond our moment together, some life I have not taken into account, and which he will be free to enter only when our journey together is done. I have tried to induce out of the animal in him some notion of what it is to be human. I wonder now if he hasn’t already begun to discover in himself some further being. Is he, in fact, as the villagers thought (their view was always simpler than mine, and perhaps therefore nearer the truth) some foundling of the gods? Is it his own nature as a god that his body is straining towards, at this edge of his own life where any ordinary child might be about to burst into manhood, and into his perfect limits as man? He moves out of sight, hovering there, vague and glowing, just beyond the capacity of my eye to distinguish what it sees. And at the same time, with bent back, he squats on his haunches, his grimy hands with their cracked and broken nails working to prepare the food I can barely swallow now. He takes infinite pains over it, half chewing the fibrous tubers to make them palatable and feeding me the pulp, as he must have seen animals do with their young.
And so we come to it, the place. I have taken my last step, though he does not know it yet, as he moves away as usual to forage for our evening meal. From here I ascend, or lower myself, grain by grain, into the hands of the gods. It is the place I dreamed of so often, back there in Tomis, but could never find in all my wanderings in sleep – the point on the earth’s surface where I disappear.
It is not at all as I had imagined. There are no wolves. It is clear sunlight, at the end of a day like each of the others we have spent out here, a fine warm spring day with larks in the air, and insects shrilling under our feet. The Child is here. I watch him moving away along the edge of a stream, stooping, kneeling, starting off again with his spring-heeled gait as he gathers snails amongst the weeds.
Strange to look back on the enormous landscape we have struggled across all these weeks, across the sea, across my life in Rome, across my childhood, to observe how clearly the footprints lead to this place and no other. They shine in my head, all those steps. I can, in my mind, follow them back, feeling myself with each step restored, diminished, till I come to the ground of my earliest memories again, and am standing in the checkered light of olives at the very edge of our farm, with wings glittering beyond the low stone wall and a goatherd dozing against one of the olives, his rough head tilted back and all the throat exposed, as if he had been dozing like that, just as I last remember him, for nearly sixty years. One of the goats, which is black, has just jerked up on to its hind legs to munch at a vine shoot. It is spring. It is summer. I am three years old. I am sixty.
The Child is there.
He turns for a moment to gaze at me across his shoulder, which is touched with sunlight, then stoops to gather another snail from the edge of the stream. He rises and goes on. The stream shakes out its light around his ankles as he wades deeper, then climbs on to a smooth stone and balances for a moment in the sun, leaps, leaps again, then wanders upstream on the other bank, which is gravel, every pebble of it, white, black, gray, picked out and glittering in the late sunlight as in a mosaic, where he pauses, gathers one, two, four snails, and with the stream rippling as he steps in and out of it, walks on, kicking at the gravel with his toes and lost for a moment in his own childlike pleasure at being free.
I might call to him. I have the voice for that. But do not. To call him back might be to miss the fullness of this moment as it is about to be revealed, and I want so much, at the very end here, to be open to all that it holds for me.
The fullness is in the Child’s moving away from me, in his stepping so lightly, so joyfully, naked, into his own distance at last as he fades in and out of the dazzle of light off the water and stoops to gather – what? Pebbles? Is that what his eye is attracted by now, the grayest, most delicately veined of them? Or has he already forgotten all purpose, moving simply for the joy of it, wading deeper into the light and letting them fall from his hands, the living and edible snails that are no longer necessary to my life and may be left now to return to their own, the useless pebbles that where they strike the ground suddenly flare up as butterflies, whose bright wings rainbow the stream.
He is walking on the water’s light. And as I watch, he takes the first step off it, moving slowly away now into the deepest distance, above the earth, above the water, on air.
It is summer. It is spring. I am immeasurably, unbearably happy. I am three years old. I am sixty. I am six.
I am there.