The Dead Seagull (8 page)

But I saw in her face, instead, the heavens at night, silent, full of the birth of new stars, glittering with incipient miracles, dark with possibilities, an infinitesimal world of millions blazing at the end of an eyelash, all human happiness and misery rocked in the hammock of a cheek, all the glory of love in the sunset of her lips as she moistened them over each other. And I leaned my head downward into this universe of a single life and heard the silence in between the expressible antinomies speak in the voice of Francisco de Ossuma: “The greater Love is, the less it has need of words. Because Love, if it is true, is unable to seek the exercise of subtle reasonings, but works great things in silence.”

*  *  *  *

The evening looped its cloths about the bedroom and the glass of milk on a small table looked like a huge pearl. In the distance the hollow echo arose of a workman plying a hammer on wood; but this ceased in a short time and there was no sound in the cottage. Marsden stood gazing into space out of the window. I looked long at that face that has smiled at me from the frames of famous pictures in every great gallery, that face of the mistress of all the great masters. I saw again, and more deeply, a face in which fruits and cherubs sought to conceal the orgies of egoism taking place in a cave behind them; a face in which the suicide or the devotee, casting himself in the hope of drowning, would find, instead, dynamos that slowly cut him into pieces. I saw in this face rocks with mannequins combing their hair. The face of an Ischia where the wave is smiling; the beauties, combing their hair, utter the inveiglings of her conversations, and out of view, not heard, feared but not suspected, the sty of victims, fatuously happy and irrecoverably degraded, slewing about in the juice of infatuation. The face of the mother of mysteries that should remain forever unrealised.

As I looked at her, the silence of the bedroom, with the dying figure on the bed, the big breasted beauty at the window, the first personal singular half way between them, I sensed that the nature of the silence suddenly changed: then it was charged, in a moment, with what was about to happen. This anticipation struck me quite still, as nature is fixed and rooted the moment before the eruption or the earthquake. Marsden, at the window, seemed to turn to stone. The silence overwhelmed everything with its consciousness of the climax that was to follow: and in this silence, where only Theresa’s heavy breathing existed, I heard, distantly, a voice, quite different from Marsden’s, speak no more than a couple of words.

But because I knew that this was an hallucination I made no sign that I had heard anyone speak. Then Marsden, trembling, turned to me from the window, her eyes glittering and splendid with self-examination, an expression upon her face of daemonic elation and uncomprehending inevitability, and in a louder voice repeated the sentence that opened her womb and revealed the child curled inside it.

“Yes,” she said sharply, closing her eyes, “yes. It is true.”

The face of the figure on the bed, white and smiling, seemed to me then to violate the laws of physics and detach itself from the body whose sufferings it at once showed and concealed from the world. And I thought that it hung suspended in the air in front of me, like a bird about to enter its tree. The lips, discoloured, parted to speak, but I heard no sound. It looked at me with trust and gentleness and truth. Then, wailing and moaning, it fell spinning down away from me, and the word that it moaned was the verb of love.

I knelt by the bedside and took Theresa’s hand where it lay upon the cover. Marsden, at the window, stared down in pride and deference at life and death. Theresa turned her head slowly away from me towards the window. Exaggerated by shadows, Marsden stood like a monument in the room. Her shadow lay across the bed. In a high, clear, seemingly inspired voice, as though it were called up from the depths that only her last agonies of mind could reach, Theresa cried out, twice, before she died: “I curse you! I curse you!”

I WRITE THESE LAST PAGES TO YOU, MY DEAR Sebastian, without in any way hoping that even my most importunate solicitations will disturb your sleep, or, if you do not sleep, reach you wherever you happily are. No, it is not in the belief that communication between us is even conceivable that I write your name here; it is simpler, and sadder, and more wretched than the illusory supernaturalism of an impossible correspondence: it is, my dear son, the sensation I have of your standing here, a tall child with a recognisable face and a somehow familiar manner, your standing here at the side of this white table, as I write your name a yard away from your presence. And if you were indeed here, a grown boy of—let me say—thirteen or fourteen years, old enough, then, to ask the truly hard questions, the simple ones that drag up the roots of truth with them, if you were here, on this afternoon of rain and memory and remorse, what would you say to me? I can bear the bitterness of your accusations, if you should choose to accuse me. And if you should ask for reasonable explanations, I could give these, too—even though these reasonable explanations would be reasonable explanations of unreasonable happenings.

Will you ask me why you died? Is this question the perpetual uneasiness that vexes your cherubim of a spectre? No, this, I am sure, is not the great interrogation that you carry about like a crux anxata in front of you. For now, hopping about in eternals, playing with the mercy and justice of God as you might have played with my watch and my fountain pen, you will know that the answer to the question, Why, is always the same. For, now, you yourself are part of the answer to this question. I can believe, myself, that the dispensations of the heavenly Will bend their heads and listen, if they bend them at all, to the supplications of the dead rather than to those of the living. Even that, to some degree, the will of God is—no, not modified, not mollified, but, made, perhaps, a little more human, by the accumulated admonitions of all those who have died. So that we, the living, are, in this sense, indebted to our predecessors for some small mercies.

Then I say that, simply because you died, you will know better than I do why you died. And, my dear son, as you stand, in my mind, no more than an embrace away from me in this room, I would wish to read a sentence to you from the confessions of a cardinal I spent this morning perusing: “And so I argue,” he writes, “about the world;
if
there be a God,
since
there is a God, the human race is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity. It is out of joint with the purposes of its Creator. This is a fact, a fact as true as the fact of its existence, and thus the doctrine of what is theologically called original sin becomes to me almost as certain as that the world exists, and as the existence of God.” You will ask me for what reason I repeat that desperate cry of John Henry Newman’s. I do so because I have discovered the nature and name of the mystery he terms “some terrible aboriginal calamity”, the calamity in which we necessarily labour. My dear son, it is love. Yes, Love is the terrible aboriginal calamity.

*  *  *  *

Outside my window a handful of women, hung around a magnificent renaissance fountain, belabour their washing with sticks, and gossip, and play with their dirty children. Often I cannot tell whether it is their voices or the sudden flutter of pigeons that I hear below. The rain, as I wrote, ceased, and the Italian sun stepped out of a cloud; after sharp showers, said Peace, most sheer is the sun, and love is never warmer than after war in this world. For then the bodies of those who have died, lying about among stars and rocks, sidle together, like the lovers on the hillside at the Messina earthquake, and kiss the cold from each other’s mouths. So, my dear son, I kiss you. For I think that I, too, have died.

Not far from my window a lake lies deep among mountains, and, in the evenings, I often walk along its single stretch of shore. It is a birthplace of mirages. Out of the flickering waters and the sometimes flashing mountains, with, lately, the stars, out of the reflections and shadows, the apparatus, as it were, for my apparitions, the gilded images of my memory have emerged and followed me along the foreshore.

You, my sweet Sebastian, shot full of wounds, a little boy trailing a martyrdom behind him, holding your mother by her hand, and she with her face wiped away by the handkerchief of grief, you both have walked with me by the lake. And now I am no longer surprised—indeed, if you do not do so, I am actually disappointed—when you accompany me. When one evening in the late summer, you, both of you, for what must have been the second or third time, took me, at either side, by the hand, and the three of us walked in silence, each in no way puzzled at the presence of the others, that evening, I remember, returning alone along the shore, I was faintly surprised—I was even, I think, a little bit amused—to find only one parallel of shoeprints going where we had gone. And I soon grew accustomed to that at first exacerbating sensation of knowing either you or your mother was following me, at all sorts of unpropitious times, just at the rear of my vision’s sideways extension.

But not all these illusions were gilded with this idyllic melancholy. I was awakened on the morning of Sunday the twenty-seventh of August by a voice crying my name out loudly from beneath the window. This voice, high and sweet like the note of a flute, pierced a dream in which, for the hundredth time, you and I, my small son, sailed in boats or rode upon ponies or quietly strolled together; and in the dream, suddenly and fiercely, at a moment when you were, by mischance, out of my sight, I trembled to hear your voice calling my name, as though you had lost me. I awoke with sweat in my hands. It was still almost dark. A cold wind blew in through the open window. The quiet of the hour before morning sat like a dew upon all things in the room. My heart galloped about my breast and tossed its horns wildly. And then, again, clear, not twenty yards from me, your voice brightly cried out the name of its father. It called me again and again. Not with impatience, not with resentment, not with accusation, but in a clear, sweet insistence, as though you knew that I would come, without failure, in a few moments.

I was not frightened—for how could you
frighten
me?—but I was physically paralysed. My body had turned to glass as I stood halted in the motion of rising from the bed. This paralysis shattered itself, an instant later, when you called again, but this time with a sort of peremptory appeal. I went to the open window and stared down into the morning shadows, expecting, dreading, desiring, praying, to see, upturned, your boy’s face smiling at our first real meeting.

Out of the patterned cage of shadows cast by the laurel tree, bright and gold there, like a young fruit, the big eyes suddenly averted as I gazed down, there, Sebastian, glimmered your ten-year-old face of an angel, the lips (oh, trumpet and kisses!) pouted in parting. Looking directly at me, you called my name again. Your voice flew into my breast and broke my heart. It groaned and broke.

In this grief I heard, then, a door open and close and the scuffling of feet below; a second voice, also a boy’s voice, fluttered rapid Italian. And when I looked down again I saw two ragged village urchins making hurriedly away toward the lake for their morning bathe.

*  *  *  *

Was this instant of mistaken existence in truth a visitation? It was, it was. Beside that window I suffered you into a heartbreak of life. Under that window you deluded me into a life of heartbreak.

*  *  *  *

Do not ever leave me. O admonitions and illusions, voices, the crack of the overloaded heart, the haunters of the derelict kingdom, remain with me always.

*  *  *  *

And equally to you, dead mother of a dead son, I do not so much speak these last lines as dedicate, if this should be possible, some valedictory offices. I will not pester with posthumous attentions the memory of a love that in its heyday wept too often in corners at the paucity of my attentions. Dull-eyed, the incomprehensible monster sits inside me, staring, like a homicidal lunatic, at the evidence of its incomprehensibility and its monstrosity.

For, in truth, my bed was made by my own hands, down to the stone at the foot and the lachrymatory at the head: I confess from the bitter depths of my heart that I sleep there with a misery that is not entirely miserable, with an unrest that is not wholly distressful; for the misery of it is shot through with penances and expiations, and the unrest, sometimes, takes on a tortured attitude of flagellatory exculpation.

So that, in all honesty, if there is any honesty, I cannot offer to you even these ineffectual recompenses; they are all disfigured and defaced by my necessity—I would, a world and a year ago, have said my moral necessity. The great effigies of guilt rise looming and moaning from misdemeanours too small ever to have housed them, or from crimes so twisted in shape and nature that nothing, not even the guilt, could ever escape from them. Nevertheless it rises and goes crying out forever afterward over the whole world and down all the years. “Do you blame him?” they say of the wife-beater or the alderman who raped his seventeen-year Venus of a daughter; no, we do not. It is destiny, the engine of justice, that nightly places a beloved corpse in the wife-beater’s bed, and plants in the womb of the alderman’s daughter a female embryo in whose womb a female embryo cuddles around a womb in which a pregnant daughter contains a recessional infinity of daughters. For destiny is simply what we desire coming up to us in the disguise of what we deserve. He was not a wise judge who remarked to the mother: “Madam, it was wrong to burn your two babies in the fireplace. Neither the babies nor the fireplace were designed for this purpose.” I could wish to inform this honourable magistrate that he was wrong: it is precisely the place for which destiny intended both.

How dare the instruments of its execution conceive it possible that they might, even darkly, comprehend the intentions of the divine will? When the pencil turns round in my hand and judges this sentence, I, too, my god, will turn in your hand and make judgments also.