Barefoot in the Head (3 page)

They stared out at the tangerine stripes of the square. People passed slowly. The used cars slumped on their haunches listening to the distant noise of traffic, like new animals awaiting battle.

He asked. ‘Did you have a mystical experience ever?’

‘I suppose so. Isn’t that what religion is?’

‘I don’t mean that stuff!’ With his cigar, he indicated the illuminated stone outside. ‘A genuine self-achieved insight, such as Ouspenski achieved.’

‘I never heard of him.’

‘He was a Russian philosopher.’

‘I never heard of him.’

Already he was forgetting what he had seen and learned.

As he nursed his head and tried to understand what was inside it, she began to chatter, tongue delicate against teeth and lips redeeming the nonsense.

‘I’ll go back to Milano in the autumn, in September when it’s not so hot. They’re not good Catholics here in Metz. Are you a good Catholic? The French priests — ugh, I don’t like them, the way they look at you! Sometimes I hardly seem to believe any more... Do you believe in God any more, Signor?’

He turned and looked painfully at her orange eyes, trying to see what she was really saying. She was very boring, this girl, and without alternative.

‘If you are really interested, I believe we each have gods within us, and we must follow those.’ His father had said the same.

‘That’s stupid! Those gods would just be reflections of ourselves and we should be indulging in egotism to worship them.’

He was surprised by her answer. Neither his Italian nor his theology was good enough for him to reply as he would have liked. He said briefly, ‘And your god — he is just an externalisation of egotism. Better to keep it inside!’

‘What terrible, wicked blasphemy for a Catholic to utter!’

‘You little idiot, I’m no Catholic! I’m a Communist! I’ve never seen any sign of your God marching about the world. He’s a capitalist invention!’

‘Then you are indeed sick!’

Angrily laughing, he grabbed her wrist and pulled her towards him. As she struggled, he shouted, ‘Let’s make a little investigation!’

She brought her skull forward and struck him on the nose. His head turned cathedral-size on the instant, flooded with pain. He hardly realised she had broken from his grip and was running across the square, leaving the Banshee’s passenger door swinging open.

After a minute or two, Charteris locked the car door, climbed out, and made his way across to the hotel. The door was barred; Madame would be in bed, dreaming dreams of locked chests. Looking through the window into the bar, he saw that M’sieur still sat at his special table, drinking wine with his crony. Madame’s dog sprawled by the radiator, still restlessly changing its position. The eternal recurrence of this evening, a morgue of life.

The enchanter Charteris tapped on the window to break their spell of sleeping wake.

After a minute or two, M’sieur unlocked the door from inside and appeared in his shirtsleeves. He stroked his tiny puff of beard and nodded to himself; as if something significant had been confirmed.

‘You were fortunate I was still up, M’sieur! Madame my wife does not like to be disturbed when once she has locked and barred the premises. My friend and I were just fighting some of our old campaigns before bed.’

‘Perhaps I have been doing the same thing.’

‘You’re too young! Not the pesky Arabs, the Bosche, boy, the Bosche! This very town was once under Bosche rule, you know!’

He went up to his room. It was filled with noise. As he walked over to the window and looked out, he saw that a lock gate on the dry canal had been opened. The bed of it was full of rushing water, coursing over the car body and other rubbish, slowly moving them downstream. All the long night, Charteris slept uneasily to the noise of the purging water.

In the morning, he rose early, drank Madame’s first indifferent coffee of the day, and paid his bill. Angelina did not appear. His head was clear, but the world seemed less substantial than it had been. Something was awakening and uncoiling within him, making the very ground he trod seem treacherous, as if invisible snakes lay there. He could not decide whether he stood on the edge of truth or illusion, or a yet unglimpsed alternative to either. All he knew was his anxiety to escape from old battle pictures and stale caporal smells.

Carrying his grip out to the car, he climbed in, strapped himself up, and drove round the cathedral onto the motorway, which was already roaring with traffic. He turned towards the coast, leaving Metz behind at a gradually increasing speed, heading for his imagined England.

Metz Cathedral

Strong vertical lines familiarise

An alien love. Yet the cathedral

Escapes its statement after dusk

When for the tourist trade they floodlight

It and all-too-solid piety

Fragments in its own enormous shadows

Of buttresses, porches, peeling pillars.

Nothing familiar then: a cage

For something frightful? So you park

Outside and maybe make a joke

About the modern restorations

Being turned into a 3D Braque:

So much worse than it’s bright:

And head towards the nearest bar, where

Horizontal lines familiarly

Provide the indifference of a bed.

Night-time

Night-time

The town sleeps...

I pretend to sleep

By the cloaca maxima

The clock strides

Midnight
— yes, that’s true

Enough. How goes the song?

A boy wanders
across

The fields among the peonies

O Serbia I have another name

All things have other names

And will that change them

And will that change them

As I am changed?

Looking for his loved one’s

House
... Let’s hope her

Bed springs did not clang!

Night-time

The town sleeps

The springs strike

And I wander across

The midnight fields

Looking for the house

The house where dancing is

The Girl at the Inn

The city was open to the nomad

The fountain sparkled for his lips

But at the inn the girl who served there

Had nothing to spare a traveller

The traveller settled at the inn

Although he left his bill unpaid

The girl no longer held him strange

One day she let him clasp her lightly

And then that night he clasped her tightly

Now she lets him clasp her nightly

Wrongly rightly clasp her nightly

The traveller sang He loved the girl

And was captive of the city

This was their tiny personal story

Like perhaps to many others

Or why else should he say the curious thing

When smiling to her smiles one day

Although I love you dearly love

There’s nothing personal in it

And then that night he clasped her tightly

Still she lets him clasp her nightly

Wrongly rightly clasp her nightly

The Knowledge That the Car is Going to Crash

The knowledge that the car is going to crash

The ponic jungle blowing through its tunnels

The certainty that bodies burst apart

Is with me as I put my foot down

And racial memory’s the dangling chain

That earths me to a neolithic road

Earlier youths and stabs of unearned knowledge

Milano blinds my eyes its dust

Somebody said ‘I knew the blazing plane

Was going to crash before I clambered in’

A premonition isn’t quite the same

Thing as the suffering

What if I knew that every word I spoke

Fell into silence deep as any sea

Or sailed it drunken derelict should that

Stop up a throat others have used

I am not powerless even though the power

Was never mine the blazing plane came down

Though vulnerable I keep the power to wound

Draw blood from bloodless faces

The knowledge that my car is going to crash

Is my inheritance and monkeys take

Their seats before the jungle blurs again

Can’t daunt me as I put my foot down

Zimmer Twenty

The glories of La Patrie in coloured lithographs

All up and down the airless stairs

The Huns are always running. Not my battle. But he laugh;

Suppose that Zimmer Twenty really cares?

This bed’s a battlefield for unconsumated doubts

Madame would charge more for it if she dared

It’s so familiar worn sheets dry canal. Before she shouts

Suppose that Zimmer Twenty really cared?

To speak to him of childhood — and in my native tongue

Or foreign in my old aunt’s prayers

Exiled committed in this beastly town and not so young

Suppose that Zimmer Twenty really cares?

How often Zimmer Twenty seems to care

The sluice gates open every midnight to the good

Every dawning morn more debris thrown down there

They’re not good Catholics in this rotten town

Fat old M’sieu with fingertips all brown

In Milano Milano there’s better blood

Behind the other shutters neutrality is lying

I give myself defy them. There

My body’s breath mists up the pane crying crying

Who’s Zimmer Twenty? Should I care?

THE SERPENT OF KUNDALINI

At the French port, they were sceptical, smiling, nodding, looking wizened, walking behind their barriers in a clockwork way. He stood there waving his NUNSACS papers which later, on the ferry going across to England, he consigned to the furtive waters.

They let him through at the last, making it clear he would find it harder to get back once he was out.

As yet he had nothing to declare.

Once the French coast and customs were left behind, he fell asleep.

When Charteris woke, the ship had already moored in Dover harbour and was absolutely deserted except for him. Even the sailors had gone ashore. Grey cliffs loomed above the boat. The quays and the sea were empty. The void was made more vacant by its transparent skin of flawless early spring sunshine.

The unwieldy shapes of quays and sheds did nothing to make the appearance of things more likely.

Just inside one of the customs sheds on the quay, a man in a blue sweater stood with his arms folded. Charteris saw him as he was about to descend the gangplank, and paused with his hand on the rail. The man would hardly have been noticeable; after all, he was perhaps thirty yards away; but, owing to a curious trick of acoustics played by the empty shed and the great slope of cliff; the man’s every sound was carried magnified to Charteris.

The latter halted between ship and land, hearing the rasp of the waiting man’s wrists as he refolded his arms, hearing the tidal flow of his breath in his lungs, hearing the infinitesimal movement of his feet in his boots, hearing his watch tick through the loaded seconds of the day.