The Dead Seagull (5 page)

*  *  *  *

House what inhospitalities or inhumanities that it may, nevertheless, here in this immense city, the collusion between the will of man and the will of his creator is most manifest. The city drags our moral corpse to what we hope will be at least a decent burial. But the doorsteps are regularly swept, and the milk is delivered by one who does not love his customers; the civic officers, in spite of the frosted glass of their careerism, occasionally sign enfranchising documents; the policeman on point duty, without knowing why, arrests an accident; the river obeys the laws of aquadynamics and, bringing water, of charity. Even rain sometimes falls.

*  *  *  *

Duty, that donkey-engine of love, outlasts everything.

*  *  *  *

O Ariadne, Ariadne, lead me, on a string, out of my own emotions! What have I done? Why do they walk not quite silently behind me in the streets, those whom I hate and love at the same time, their hands gentle but firm upon the ropes they guide me with, their whispered exhortations piercing my back like knives, their unuttered endearments cluttering my feet, their dependence, even though they hold the ropes, pinioning them, Ariadne, and not me.

I went to Marsden yesterday.

*  *  *  *

And, most of all, it was the apparently miserable who were the most gratified, for their misery hung about them like a barbarous and magnificent decoration: they could never remain unnoticed. Now, I, too, am one of them; one of the innumerable miserable, parading my grief up and down the pavements, eliciting, if I can, a word or a coin from those who find these things easier to give than real pity.

“Excuse me, but you seem rather young to have the shudders.” An old gentleman with a walking stick remarked to me as I stood waiting for an underground train. I saw Marsden, sprawled half naked on the bed, her lazy breasts rubescent, one arm thrown about a laced pillow, a shoe with a wing on her left foot and the other bare, and the cornucopia of her mouth emptied of its kisses; I saw her look up at me like a sea anenome, like a giant squid with a tiara upon its head, full. She kicked off the single black shoe and flung the clothes off the bed. Then she lay back, extended her arms across the pillow, and a smile like the morning of the first day of history loosened her mouth and lighted her eyes. It was the animal tasting moral blood. I shuddered and the old man in the underground remarked, “Excuse me, but you seem
 
…
 
” And I knew that my vanity was wearing disgust like jewels.

*  *  *  *

I said that I have a story to relate. At certain times in certain seasons certain birds migrate to certain countries: I ask you, is this a story? It is better than that: it is the cyclix of history. My love, you have been loved by every man since the beginning. My love, you will be abandoned by every man until the end.

*  *  *  *

I lived with Marsden in a small house by the river for three weeks. Theokopolos called one morning, drank coffee with us, and left, so he said, for Paris. I wrote a letter to Theresa telling her that my return had been delayed by a hitch in the conditions governing the literary fund’s grant to me. Serene as a queen she sent back to me, in the care of my publishers, a note warning me not to imperil the grant by haste or impetuosity. The deceptions, already, begin to exercise upon me the fascination of adjustable mirrors.

*  *  *  *

Pig-woman, Circe, was I happy in your sty? There was that sentence written on the wall: Upon those who sacrifice the future to the present, the future will, in time, exact a terrible revenge. Are you, Circe, the retribution that my unknowledgeable past has taken upon me; Was it the virginity of my desires that invested you with an irresistible bestiality? Did Theresa’s nightly kiss, like a bough dipping into a river, gather all this filth that finally breaks it? Yes, the responsibility, where shall we find it? Have we vanquished an enemy? We have not vanquished ourselves.

It was not Circe who was a pig, it was her lovers.

*  *  *  *

What calypsoes it caterwauls, the sweet beast in us, reclining, sticky with sweat, on the beaches of sensuality! The mermaids comb their hair and sing on the testicular rocks: who sails past them with wax in his ears? What song the sirens sang was the blind hymning of two hundred million sperm for the light of day. The future takes its revenge on them by an appalling exaction of the punishment: to be.

*  *  *  *

And in the evenings, the last week of the three, we went down to the gardens by the river and sat on a bench looking along the Chiswick reaches. Marsden would sit, with the light of a single street lamp falling on her face, and the bouqueted colour of her features testifying too much love. With her arm in mine she rested there in silence, only the bright dancing of her gaze taking everything visible to her in a gesture of supreme possession. The other lovers would meander by with the happy disregard of fellow criminals in gaol. Then, “We must talk,” she said, one evening. “There is so much to be said.”

“There is nothing to be said. What good can saying things do for us now? I saw you and I loved you. There is nothing to be said.”

“What are you going to do?”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to live with me.”

The river took on new depths and shapes as the moon arose and shone upon it. The tall bridge to the right turned into a construction of glass and silver. A couple, strolling down a path, the light of the moon about them, ceased to be human and became spectres. Everything, in that livid moment, died but went on existing. The surface of the river broke into thousands of pieces as a light wind crossed it.

“Let us go in. It’s cold out here.”

*  *  *  *

The misery and the guilt of the bodily splendours! The slight odour of hell in the dishevelled bed. At the centre of the world sits the wise ovum, to whom, in biological obedience, all things come. It was not Persephone, Orpheus, that you went down under ground for, it was the procreatory spring. Rites of fertility, orgies of generation, phallus imperator, the obscene machine: we are the monstrous automata of multiplication, the delegated exuviae of god.

It was then that I had to recognise that the normal systems of society function only for those who fulfil them; not for those who, failing, therefore most need them. The dog with the mange is the one we cast out, and the dog we take to our bosom is the whole one. Does the dead seagull deserve to die; The exaggeration contains the germs of its own decease. But the limits of life can be ascertained only by the expedition of an exaggeration. “Man is only truly great in his passions.” The moral pariahs, by demanding our commiseration, enlarge the dimensions of our sympathies.

*  *  *  *

Marsden sits for hours staring out of the open french window: the unwashed dishes build up in the sink, the bed remains unmade all day, discarded or dropped things, some crushed, some broken, accumulate on the floor; the fire is seldom lighted and we live off coffee. Ostracised explorers at the North Pole would understand. We see no one, we desire no one, we expect no one, we think of no one. The disease of ego-maniacal sensuality isolates us from everything.

I feel, sometimes, that only this disease keeps us together.

Why have I let this greedy and randy bitch start tearing my life to rags? Only because I am randier and greedier. Yet it was sweet to dream of a child and wife and a home, but the sea and the sun seemed weary, the barren fields of the south weary as well, and I said, “I will not return.”

*  *  *  *

“I have a present for you,” Marsden remarked quietly. She went to a book and took a document from it. “It’s for you. I arranged it last week.”

I read a little: it was a deed of transference assigning a cottage in Scotland and two fields to me.

She took the paper back and, dropping on her knees, held my hand in hers. “Don’t you see I can’t help it? I don’t care if you do think I’m horrible. And I don’t care if I do have to buy you with cottages or beds or babies or books or sacrifices or anything. I want you and I don’t mind what price they ask for you. Let me show you.” In an instant she thrust into my lap a red notebook that she snatched from a drawer. “Come to the bed,” she said imperatively, “I want to read some of it to you.”

The passages she read in a remote monotone described dreams and expectations of our meeting. There was a paragraph that had been written in the south of France: it ended in a hysteria of frustrated anticipation. “You see,” she said as she put the book down. “Do you believe me now?”

I embraced her tenderly and told her that I could do without the cottage in Scotland.

“Then we can sell it to give the money to Theresa. Marvellous.”

“But do you really think that she would accept it?”

“Why shouldn’t she? She’s got no money.”

“Perhaps she’s not prepared to sell whatever it is that you would be buying from her.”

“How ridiculous. It’s a gift, not a payment.”

“Do you really think it is?”

She stared at me violently. “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

*  *  *  *

How much of our sudden aversion for each other, and as sudden love, comes from our having caged ourselves together? And what we are caged in is, in the end, the locked and barred box of zoological sex. I am reminded of that frightful story I once heard of a young pair of lovers who, in the act of love, got fatally interlocked. Was it love or sex that killed them? It is love that destroys us with the killer of sex. Sex without love is utterly incapable of sin; this is the coupling of beasts in a moral void. Love without sex is the great prince in prison.

Even now, after so short a time, I hate Marsden’s laziness and greediness; she will lie in a dirty bed all day, occasionally turning over on her elbow to murmur: “Make me a cup of coffee and come and talk to me.” I read on the balcony above the river and get so hungry, after a few hours, that I go out for a plate of food. When I get back, the bed is a trifle more ruffled, the cigarette ends have accumulated and the air has become a little more acrid. She spends hours trying the effects of new cosmetics. Then, late in the afternoon, she throws the bedclothes off the bed and disappears into the bathroom. I hear her, after some time, call me lightly from the shower. I go to her, and then, like the giant squid, her glistening arms fold about me, her face, decorated with pink and gold crystals, covers mine, and I know that I can hide all my aversions and my dissatisfactions, my conscience, my guilt, my self-disgust, my pity—I can hide it all in the hollow of her hand.

*  *  *  *

Outside, in the gardens, all sorts of flowers have suddenly appeared. The little white boats glide like gnats under the bridge. A painter has set up his easel on the opposite bank and appears to be portraying the house in which we live. There are pale blues and evanescent greens everywhere. And now, when I revisit these occasions in my memory, what most of all mystifies me is the mindlessness of my existence during those three weeks. Whatever intentions I had, if I had any, evaded my resolution; my resolution stopped short at the simplest physical pleasures, like watching the boats on the water, the painter at his easel, the glass of cold water like swallowing a knife, and the walk in the rain. When Theresa appeared to me, as she did almost nightly, it was as though I saw my wife come to me like Alcestis from the grave. I existed in a hypnotic trance or an opium dream or a somnambulation. That sense of rather dramatic urgency—a sense underlying almost all of even our most miscellaneous intentions, present simply because we know we are alive—that sense had left me, and I saw myself existing as it were in a single dimension: the dimension of sensual satisfaction. The disgust, the degradation, the revulsion, were all part of this satisfaction. What depth of shame do we lie in when we sink back on the plush cushions of our disgust and sigh? It is the dog going back to his vomit, attracted to it by a simple miracle: it is his own.

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The deceptions, like conjuring tricks, exercise upon me a fascination I cannot entirely analyse: I believe that if one of them were to fail I should be disappointed and not disquieted. Sigh no more, sea; sigh no more, shore. But most of all I deceive myself: I no longer know who I really am, where I naturally live, what I truly desire. Marsden, without any encouragement other than her own wishes, and in spite of my simplest denials, has persuaded herself that I intend to go on living forever in this pretty sty by the river. How can she possibly bring herself to believe that I could so unhesitatingly and so effortlessly abandon Theresa, the child and the sweet past? She can bring herself to believe this only too easily: she wants to believe it.

*  *  *  *

“I’ve got to talk to Theresa. I’m going down to the cottage tomorrow or the next day.” I spoke out of another prolonged silence. Marsden was sticking coloured pictures into a scrapbook.

“I’m coming with you,” she exclaimed before I had finished speaking. “You can’t leave me here. I won’t stay. This is my business too. What do you want to talk to Theresa about?”

“What do
you
want to talk to her about?”

“I don’t want to talk to her. I want to come with you.”

“And I don’t want you to come for a perfectly simple reason. It would upset her very much. And I don’t intend to upset her. Not at this time.”

“How about upsetting me? I want to come for a perfectly simple reason. I belong to
y
ou.”

“I don’t mind upsetting you because you’re not pregnant. You’re quite capable of amusing yourself for a couple of weeks. By then, perhaps, things will have become a bit clearer. Take a plane to Paris. Go to Scotland.”

“You beast!” she cried, and threw herself at me kicking and spitting and scratching. I felt her nails, like claws, lay my cheek open. Her teeth had drawn blood from my hand. I shook her off. She screamed and twisted on the floor in a sort of masturbatory hysteria. Instead of decreasing, her violence ignited itself. I thought that her ranting and crying out whipped up her delirium. I boxed her ears thoroughly.

And then, in a transformation, her whole body stiffened, she ceased screaming and sank back, like a feline, on her haunches. Without another sound she sprang, her eyes dazzling with hatred and the passion to kill, straight at my face. I struck at her as I would have struck at a female panther. I felt the blood running down my arm: she had bitten the flesh through my shirt. As she fought in my arms I could, quite coldly, feel the tears of misery and disgust behind my eyeballs. I threw her off and she fell, thrashing like a scorpion, into a heap of bedclothes that were strewn by the bed. I licked the open wound on my forearm and went to the door. From her sudden sobbing on the floor, sobbing as human and inhuman pride fallen can make it, the small voice of a young girl arose. “Oh, don’t go,” she whispered, not looking up. “Don’t go.”