Shroud (9 page)

I rose unsteadily and went and shut the window, seeking to block out the noise of the street. It was not yet seven and already the day was in full, clamorous swing; I thought wistfully of Arcady 's somnolent mornings. On the bedside table behind me the telephone rang. I grew up without telephones, and have never managed to become accustomed to the instrument, the way it sits there, the same in every house and hotel room, ready to break out at any moment without warning, petulant and demanding as a wailing infant. I went back and sat on the side of the bed and picked up the receiver cautiously, and cautiously applied it to my ear, and for a moment saw myself as my father, with all his wariness of the world's machinery. My father. How strange. I had not thought about him in… how long? A voice was speaking in my ear, from the reception desk, to inform me that
"una persona"
was waiting for me downstairs. I nodded, as if the receptionist were standing in front of me. Then I put the receiver down again, exhaling a breath. So.

I ate breakfast in my room, unhurriedly, and afterwards lay in a scalding bath for a long time. Now that she was here, now that the moment of confrontation had arrived, I had drifted into a state of lethargy and lazy contemplation. That momentary vision of my father had stirred up all manner of unexpected memories from the far past, of my childhood, of my family, of the Vander household with its many cousins, uncles, aunts. It was as if I were drowning, calmly, with my life not so much flashing before me as playing out selected scenes for me in dreamy slow motion. At length I rose and towelled myself briskly and put on my linen suit, hopelessly wrinkled now, and my stubby tie. Grimly I grinned at myself in the mirror: the drowned man dresses for his own funeral. In the corridor there was a mortal hush. The lift arrived with its clangings and mashings and I stepped into the box and descended, with one hand in my pocket rubbing a coin – the ferryman's levy! – between a finger and thumb.

Odd, that Arcady should have been the place where I ended up, so far from everything that I had once known. It was in the wrong direction entirely; by rights, I should have been borne the opposite way, like so many others, into the heart of the calamity, the toppling towers, the fire storms, the children shrieking in the burning lake. When I got to Arcady and looked back, however, I saw that everything I had done had been pushing me relentlessly toward it, as if the essays published, the addresses delivered, the honours won, had been so many zephyrs wafting me irresistibly westward, from Europe to Manhattan, to Pennsylvania, to the plains of Indiana, to bleak Nebraska – such harsh poetry in those names! – and then in a last, high leap, over the mountains and down to that narrow strip of sunlit coast where I came to rest with a soundless, dusty thump, like a spaceman stepping on to an unknown planet. Unknown, that is the apt word. The place was always alien to me, or at least I was an alien in it. The fact is, I was never there, not really. I took no part in town life, such as it was. I did not buy a car. I never went on that delicate, spindly, far-famed red bridge. Walking in Arcady's steady sunlight, that seemed trained on me always like the light of an impersonal but ever-watchful eye, I would close my mind to the present and be again in the city where I was born, and walk again in the narrow, secret streets where I walked as a child, and see again the spires and the huddled roofs and the frozen fields beyond, scattered with tiny figures at work or play, as in one of those hackneyed Dutch genre scenes of mingled labours and festivities. Oh, what would I not have given in those unvarying Arcadian days to catch even for an instant the flash of rain-light on an April road in Flanders! And yet, I should have been at ease in Arcady. There, everyone had previously been someone else, at some time, in some entirely other existence, just like me. In all the years I lived in the town I never met a single person who had been born there.
Where are you from?
Arcadians would ask of each other, and stand smiling, brows lifted and lips expectantly parted, anticipating a story, a history. They would confide the most intimate details about themselves and their pasts, and give that characteristic shrug, shrugging it all off. The future was their legend. I, of course, fascinated them. Unlike the comrades I had left behind in New York, they were not interested in me as a political exemplar, but flocked to me nevertheless, filled with curiosity and wonder, as if they were visiting some ancient, hallowed site of immemorial rituals, battles, bloody sacrifice. They would walk around me, viewing me from all angles, wishing they had brought their cameras and their guidebooks. I encouraged them, the most agreeable or at least the most useful of them, welcomed them, accommodated them, until I judged my authenticity had been sufficiently attested, and then I shut fast the gates and let the portcullis come crashing down, and stay down, its rivets rusted fast.

Magda felt even more displaced than I did in lush and leafy Arcady. She had almost liked New York, its teeming streets, the bustle and the crowds and the ceaseless clamour of human concourse. The farther west we went the more of life was leached from her. The air in those vast spaces we travelled through dried her out, hollowed her out. In Arcady the young frightened her, from the boy on his bicycle who hurled the rolled newspaper against our front door first thing every morning with vicious energy, to the under-age hoodlums racing each other on motorbikes up and down the umbrous avenues, turning the air rancid with exhaust fumes. She began to hide from the world, hardly venturing out of the house and never without me to accompany her. I cannot recall at what point exactly I realized that her mind was decaying. Perhaps the defect was there all along, a spongy patch she had been born with in her brain, that had spread steadily until all within her cranium had turned to pulp. When did she develop her taste for toy food? I would find lollipop sticks stuck to the floors, crumbs of cake between the covers of the bed, candy wrappers floating unflushably in the lavatory bowl. Frequently now I would come into the house to meet her standing in the hall regarding me with a wild, unrecognising look. I would hear her talking to herself, in the bathroom, or on the stairs, a hushed, urgent whispering. Then one morning she walked into the kitchen leaving behind her across the floor a trail of little turds as flat as fishes, and I knew the time had come when she must go.

In the hotel lobby a coach load of elderly tourists was checking in, with much complaining and bickering; they, like me, had suffered delays and loss of luggage. I paused on my stick outside the lift and looked about. Where was she, this
persona?
Two
fat businessmen sat on low armchairs facing each other across a lower table, intent and watchful, as if in preparation for a bout of arm wrestling. A girl with red hair was hiding in the corner of a couch, with a bag at her feet, waiting for someone, hoping not to be noticed. A painted hag passed by, lost in the folds of a fur coat, with a pug dog in her arms. I went toward the reception desk but could not reach it for the milling tourists. I considered simply walking out the door and away, clearly I saw myself go, except that in my imagination my damaged leg was repaired, and my step was youthful, and rapid, and carefree. Even before she spoke I had sensed her behind me. It was the girl, of course, the girl with the red hair; I should have known. Tall; pale; freckles on her nose; eyes that were – what? – greeny-blue, yes, and flecked with amber. I noticed her tall girl's way of standing, one leg back, the forward knee bent, trying to take an inch off her height. She was holding her bag protectively before her with both hands on the strap, as if to ward off a feared and confidently expected assault.

"I am Catherine Cleave," she said. "I'm called Cass."

We sat in the lobby, facing each other from either end of the leather couch, the girl bolt upright with her fists on her knees, her raincoat beside her and her bag on the floor; she had the slightly dazed, disbelieving air of a refugee who no more than an hour ago had made it across the border under fire. I was irritable. The water splashing in the ornamental pond kept distracting my attention: what imbecile had thought to put ferns and a fountain there? I like things kept to their proper place. I studied the girl, or young woman, as I supposed I would be required to think of her. The aspect she presented was at once striking and dowdy. I noted the fine bones of her wedge-shaped face, the delicate, slightly inflamed pink at the canthus of her eyes, the blonde down on her arms and on her long, bare, bony shins. She was telling me in hurried and disjointed detail of a research project she had been engaged on, for years, it seemed, to do with Rousseau's children, if I recall; I barely listened. I was thinking how disappointed I was. I had expected someone far more formidable than this. She might have been a student of mine, one of the more desperate types, from the old days, when I still had to have students. So she hoped to make her name by exposing me, did she? Well, she might succeed, but at a cost, and what a cost, to herself no less than to me, I would make sure of that. As she talked, her eyes, unnaturally wide and bright, kept darting here and there over my person with a flickering, fascinated intensity, so that I felt I was being very rapidly assembled, a sort of living jigsaw puzzle. A faint, fast vibration came off her, as if there were something inside her spinning without cease at terrible, soundless speed. I interrupted the gabbled history of Jean-Jacques' abandoned brats to ask if she would like to have some breakfast and she looked at me in a sort of panic and vehemently shook her head. I felt as if I had come face-to-face on a forest path with a rare and high-strung creature of the wild that had paused a second in quivering curiosity and would in another second be gone with a crash of leaves. I knew the type. They always sat in the highest tier of the lecture hall, fixed on me hungrily, never speaking a word unbidden. I looked at the deep, shadowed cup above her clavicle and was surprised to feel my old libido rubbing wistfully its callused claws. I am afraid I always did favour the crazed ones.

When I enquired where she came from and she told me I said it was a grand place, home of many fine and famous poets. How could I, even on the telephone, have missed that burr, that brogue? I asked which hotel she would be staying at, and saw from the way she faltered and frowned that she had nowhere to stay. Good. Perhaps there would be a room available here, I said smoothly, lifting my eyebrows at her. She looked about dubiously at the marble floors, the chandeliers, blinking. But yes, I said, she must stay here, I was sure there would be a vacancy, I would go and arrange it, right away. As I hauled myself to my feet I saw with obscure satisfaction how she had to check herself from reaching out a hand to help me. At the desk she waited silently at my elbow; in her stillness she was still vibrating. Yes, I announced, turning to her, all airy blandness, there was a suite available, would she like that? Mutely she looked at me. I smiled. "Something more modest, then?" Her forehead reddened. The sleek young man behind the desk was stony-faced. I set a registration card before her and offered her a pen, which she declined, and instead brought out a fountain pen of her own from the pocket of her blouse. She bent to write, with a schoolgirl's frowning haste. I tried to read the address she was putting down, but could not make it out. Her handwriting startled me in its violent uncontrol; the spiked letters in slanting lines were like so many rows of smashed-up type. Deftly I snatched the key the clerk was offering her, and picked up her bag, too, before she could reach for it. She reddened again. I drank her blushes like sips of the most refined and precious cordial. For certain, I would have fun with this one! She turned toward the lift and I followed her. Wide shoulders, long haunches, and much, much too tall. Side by side we ascended, eyes cast upward. She smelled sharply of sweat as well as something dull and faintly medicinal; I sensed a past of institutions – schools, and more than schools; sanatoriums, perhaps? Perhaps her lungs were bad. I was not sure if people have bad lungs, any more. How widely one's musings range on these peculiar, these extraordinary, these fantastical, occasions.

The room I had got for her was small and looked out on a flat roof and a row of odd, blackened metal chimneys like the smokestacks of an ocean liner. I placed her bag on the bed. She stood with her back to the window in a defensive, folded-in stance, shoulders hunched forward around a chest made concave and her palms pressed together in front of her stomach. I said she must be tired, after the journey, and she said yes, it had been hard to sleep on the train. Then there was silence again. She had made no mention of the letter she had written to me or of its contents. I said that she should rest, and men we would go out together and take lunch. "Lunch?" she said, as if it were a word in a foreign language, her mouth slack and slightly askew, seeming to frame something further that she would not say. I flared my nostrils and snuffed up a draught of the room's deadened air, seeking to savour again the civet smell of her sweat. Old friend libido stirred anew. She, and the room, and the bag on the bed, and those ship's funnels outside, all seemed suddenly part of some thrilling, absurd adventure I had suddenly found myself embarked upon, and a thousand years or so dropped from me as lightly as a fall of scurf. "Lunch," I said, "yes!" brooking no objection, and nodded, and turned, and reversed my walking stick and hooked it on the door handle and opened the door, a gamesome gesture, and if I had been wearing a hat I would have tipped it, too. I shall soon be free, I told myself, not knowing what it might mean, and not caring.

Outside the door I paused; my hands were trembling.

I took her to the Esmerelda, thinking to impress her, but she paid no heed whatever to the mournful rococo splendours of the place, the red plush walls and sparkling crystal, the napkins of rich damask, the heavy antique cutlery. She hardly ate, only stabbed with her fork at the food on her plate without looking at it, pushing it this way and that. She had changed into a dull-coloured dress without sleeves that gave her, disconcertingly, the stark look of a recent and very young widow. She sat before me, straight-backed, her tall, narrow neck extended in a birdlike, swanlike, fashion, and although we were level eye to eye I had the curious feeling that she was somehow set above me, looking down. She had done something to her hair, had tied it back, or perhaps had just brushed it in some different way, exposing her broad, flat cheeks and the too-large flanges of her ears; the effect, I am not sure how, was of a not quite concentrated state of desperation. I had no appetite, but a great thirst, as always. I drank first a bottle of red wine thick as blood and afterwards repeated jolts of grappa, each one driven home with a thimbleful of tarry coffee that made my nerve-ends twitch and fizz. She sipped a glass of water. The smoke of my many cigarettes formed a rank cocoon around us and set her coughing. We were seated at a window looking on to a narrow, deserted street, with a crumbling church opposite. So many times in my long and infamous career have I sat like this across from some girl in a restaurant, cigaretted, sinisterly smiling, an arm negligently thrown over the back of my chair, holding myself up before her awed and admiring gaze like a gobletful of the rarest fine old vintage. Now here I was, doing it again, even in my senescence. I was telling her about the first winter when I lived in New York, sequestered in that basement room on Perry Street where in the summer I had feared I would die of the heat and now thought I would never be warm again. Magda showed me how to roll up newspapers to make fuel for the stove. I was working all day and half the night, no let-up, giddy with excitement and fatigue. "I knew what the thing would be called before I had put down a word," I said. "
The Alias as Salient Fact: The Nominative Case in the Quest for Identity.
I could already see the dust jacket, with the title in big bold lettering above my name in more modest twenty-four point." I chuckled, and drank my grappa, and felt with masochistic satisfaction the sulphurous, oily liquor lifting another layer of membrane from my tongue; surprising, the semblance of assuagement such tiny pains, willingly suffered, can bring to one's sense of self-loathing… Ah, but how cold it was in that room. I would sit wrapped in a blanket with only my face and my writing hand free, my brain buzzing from the barbiturates I ate by the hour. The wind coming in from the river keened in the window frame and tiny balls of soot rolled across the page where I was writing. I had tried to work in the public library, for the warmth, but had been driven out by the presence around me of so many other mendicants who were too much like myself, haggard and sighing, picking their noses and surreptitiously eating sandwiches out of brown-paper bags. Then the thing was published, and at once, as in a fairy-tale, like Cinderella in her pumpkin carriage, I arrived. "Such things were possible," I said, "in those days. One book could do it. Of course, everyone read it" – I waved a hand lazily – "and everyone thought I was speaking directly to him. Or her." I caught her eye and smiled disparagingly. Do you know those smiles, that make the flesh of your face seem to crackle like cellophane from the effort?