Dreams of Speaking (10 page)

‘It was a deep laugh,' he said, ‘not a meretricious tinkle, such as passes for female laughter in movies today …'

Afterwards he and his sisters had gone to a teahouse where they all practised imitating Greta Garbo's laugh. Sachiko was the best. She threw back her head and let loose a thunderous sound. Accidentally she knocked over a cup of green tea, and then laughed again, with the others joining in. The owner of the teahouse thought they were misbehaved: three children laughing at nothing, talking in foreign languages and playing the fool.

Mr Sakamoto smiled knowingly. ‘Not that I've seen many contemporary movies,' he added.

 

That night, Alice lay in bed, insomniac, thinking of Garbo's face, thinking of cinema. Mr Sakamoto was right; she would have to include it. Something in his story about the children practising a film-star laugh had impressed and moved her. She saw the three of them in a sepia light, hunched together in conspiratorial play, emboldened and united by movie-life mimicry. The screen carried fantasies writ large, but also bestowed games, gestural repertoires and collective stories; bestowed, moreover, a few images that stayed a lifetime, as if produced in intaglio. It was not mere absorption, but some kind of transaction. Not loss of self, but some fictive complication. Alice had heard the stuttering turn of the film strip, gearing up into expanded vision, had seen the cone of dusty light gleaming in the darkness, then the roaring big-headed
lion, the list of august names, before the swiftly seamless –
voilà!
– conveyance-to-elsewhere. She had felt Mr Sakamoto settle and relax beside her and begin to chuckle at the very first scene. Aerospace light flashed down upon them. They were rocketed off at twenty-four frames per second.

From the window of her studio, Alice watched the students at their break. They all seemed to be aged between fourteen and seventeen, and were therefore at the vulnerable, gawky age of indistinct character, vague ambition and obligatory fights with parents. As time passed, she began to see them individually, and felt a kind of long-distance affection for a few she habitually observed. There was a boy – she called him Leo – who was always alone. He had light brown hair and a thin angular face, and he always stood apart, moving in small, autistic jerks to the sound of his clamped-on headphones. Music was either his singular passion, or the device by which he excluded himself from others (or recognised
their
exclusion) in a socially plausible way. Leo always wore the same clothes – a sweater with a hood, tattered jeans – and did not smoke. His narrow body was restless, driven by music only he could hear, pounding directly into his eardrums. There was something pitiable about him, something lost.

Alice also liked to observe ‘the lovers', whom she called Gisele and Sylvain. They spent much of each break together, against the wall, embracing and kissing. Their kisses had an intense prolongation and a gorgeous succulence. When they disengaged, they stood close together, the planes of their bodies still touching, their arms still entwined. The other students seemed to respect the relationship and did not interrupt or intrude. Sometimes Alice saw Sylvain joking with the others – his possession of Gisele gave him a certain swagger – but mostly they were interlocked, alone in their own way as Leo, listening to his music.

Among the students there was also a conspicuous girl. She
was popular, and laughed loudly, in a way Mr Sakamoto would like. She wore what appeared to be layers of rags and had spiky purple hair. Her confidence was wonderful to behold. ‘Arlette' seemed to attend school only infrequently, but when she did, she was highly visible, attracting others, making noise, slipping between groups, linking them with her own intentions. The students around her talked on mobile phones and sent text messages to each other. They were all in a circuit of voices and signs; they were their own community.

Alice thought about her students, back at the university in Australia. They would now be attending lectures and writing essays. Feigning interest, nodding, pretending to have read the text. She did not miss her teaching. What she missed was contact with youth, with those who practised an assertion in the world that they took to be theirs, who saw their cities as intelligible territory, written for them, replete, awaiting, charged with intensities, who lived knitted in uttermost, secretive ways.

When Mr Sakamoto had said goodbye after the movie he had held up his hand to the side of his face, with the fingers curled and the thumb extended, making the shape of a telephone.

‘I'll call you,' he'd said as Alice began moving away.

‘I don't have a phone,' she had replied with a grin. ‘I'll call
you.
Tomorrow. At the hotel.'

It was only later that she realised she had never seen anyone of Mr Sakamoto's age make the telephonic shorthand gesture. It was an action only young people performed. It was a code of twenty-something stockbrokers and fashion designers. Of cool baristas and film students and girls-who-wanted-to-be-models. Mr Sakamoto belonged to times other than his own; the habits of his body displayed forms of appropriated youth
fulness. Perhaps the telephone had unfixed him, made him radically contemporary.

‘Tell me exactly how Bell's telephone worked.'

‘Well,' said Mr Sakamoto, ‘there is first of all the medieval principle of rays in emanation …'

‘Seriously,' she insisted.

‘Two things, that's all. Number one: electromagnetism. Electric currents generate a magnetic field around themselves. The stronger the current, the stronger the field. You send a current through a coil of wire, and the iron core of the coil is magnetised. The current can be varied in strength and the electromagnet can vibrate a flexible iron diaphragm and create a sound, any sound, even a human voice. Number two: induction. Induction is about using sound itself to vary the current. Induction means that a changing magnetic field generates currents in the circuit. So when the sound of a voice vibrates, the changes in the magnetic field induce a similarly varying current.'

‘I think I prefer the principle of rays in emanation.'

‘Yes,' admitted Mr Sakamoto. ‘Voice; it's really all about voice. It's about ripples in the air, patterns of ripples, as in a Japanese raked garden. Do you know the raked garden? Have you seen them in photographs?'

Alice nodded.

‘The raked garden always looks to me like an image of sound waves. Gardens, ocean, the beauty of energy transmission.
Tele-phone
: sound at a distance.'

They were walking slowly together by the river. The sun was shining and traces of early spring blossom, like flakes of brown tissue, hung in the moderate wind. There were dogs and pigeons; there were babies in strollers. Roller
skaters swept along the footpaths, weaving between pedestrians with imperious confidence. The streets were lively, bright.

Mr Sakamoto halted. ‘There,' he said, ‘that's the third one I've seen.' He pointed to the word ‘nuance' in white paint, in a neat cursive hand, at the foot of a wall. ‘Superior graffito, don't you think?'

They stood looking together, each in meditation.

‘Do you know,' asked Alice, ‘about Mr Eternity?'

All the way to the bistro – which Mr Sakamoto had insisted on revisiting, in order, he said, to comprehend the battle between the waiters – Alice told him the story.

There was once in Sydney, Australia, a man called Arthur Stace. Born in 1884, he was of a miserable background; his mother, father and siblings were all alcoholics. He grew up in poverty. At twelve he was made a ward of the state; he got his first job at fourteen, working in a coal mine, and by fifteen found himself in gaol. In his twenties he engaged in various criminal activities and then in the First World War he served in France, returning physically and spiritually broken. He was suffering shell shock and the effects of mustard gas, and was also partially blinded in one eye. Arthur sank further and further into a life of dereliction and alcoholism, buying methylated spirits, ‘white lady', at sixpence a bottle. Some time in 1930 he visited a Baptist food handout centre, and heard a fire-and-brimstone preacher give a remarkable sermon. The preacher stated he would like to shout the word ‘ETERNITY' in every street in Sydney. This was Arthur Stace's conversion experience. He was overcome with a need to write the word ‘eternity', in chalk or crayon, on the pavements of Sydney. For thirty-seven years – rising at 5 a.m., praying, then following God's directions to a particular site – he inscribed the word almost half a
million times. He wrote in a copperplate hand, with a flourish on the ‘E' and an extended tail on the ‘Y', which served to underline the whole word. Urban myths abounded about Mr Eternity, but he was unmasked in the fifties and with great shyness and humility accepted the identity and confessed his inscriptions. He died, aged eighty-three, in 1967, having gifted to the city these frail repetitions, this heavenly mania, this lovely obsession.