The Whirlpool (24 page)

Robert Browning lay dying in his son’s Venetian palazzo. Half of his face was shaded by a large velvet curtain which was gathered by his shoulder, the other half lay exposed to the weak winter light. His sister, son, and daughter-in-law stood at the foot of the bed nervously awaiting words or signs from the old man. They spoke to each other silently by means of glances or gestures, hoping they would not miss any kind of signal from his body, mountain-like under the white bedclothes. But for hours now nothing had happened. Browning’s large chest moved up and down in a slow and rhythmic fashion, not unlike an artificially manipulated bellows. He appeared to be unconscious.

But Browning was not unconscious. Rather, he had used the last remnants of his free will to make a final decision. There were to be no last words. How inadequate his words seemed now compared to Shelley’s experience, how silly this monotonous bedridden death. He did not intend to further add to the absurdity by pontificating. He now knew that he had said too much. At this very moment in London, a volume of superfluous words was coming off the press. All this chatter filling up the space of Shelley’s more important silence. He now knew that when Shelley had spoken it was by choice and not by habit, that the young man’s words had been a response and not a fabrication.

He opened his eyes a crack and found himself staring at the ceiling. The fresco there moved and changed and finally evolved into Shelley’s iconography – an eagle struggling with a serpent.
Suntreader
. The clouds, the white foam of the clouds, like water, the feathers of the great wings becoming lost in this.
Half angel, half bird
. And the blue of the sky, opening now, erasing the ceiling, limitless so that the bird’s wing seemed to vaporize.
A moulted feather, an eagle feather
. Such untravelled distance in which light arrived and disappeared leaving behind something that was not darkness.
His radiant form becoming less radiant
. Leaving its own natural absence with the strength and the suck of a vacuum. No alternate atmosphere to fill the place abandoned.
Suntreader
.

And now Browning understood. It was Shelley’s absence he had carried with him all these years until it had passed beyond his understanding.
Soft star
. Shelley’s emotions so absent from the old poet’s life, his work, leaving him unanswered, speaking through the mouths of others, until he had to turn away from Shelley altogether in anger and disgust. The drowned spirit had outdistanced him wherever he sought it.
Lone and sunny idleness of heaven
. The anger, the disgust, the evaporation.
Suntreader, soft star
. The formless form he never possessed and was never possessed by.

Too weak for anger now, Robert Browning closed his eyes and relaxed his fists, allowing Shelley’s corpse to enter the place in his imagination where once there had been only absence. It floated through the sea of Browning’s mind, its muscles soft under the constant pressure of the ocean. Limp and drifting, the drowned man looked as supple as a mermaid, arms swaying in the current, hair and clothing tossed as if in a slow, slow wind. His body was losing colour, turning from pastel to opaque, the open eyes staring, pale, as if frozen by an image of the moon. Joints unlocked by moisture, limbs swung easy on their threads of tendon, the spine undulating and relaxed. The absolute grace of this death, that life caught
there moving in the arms of the sea. Responding, always responding, to the elements.

Now the drowned poet began to move into a kind of Atlantis consisting of Browning’s dream architecture; the unobtainable and the unconstructed. In complete silence the young man swam through the rooms of the Palazzo Manzoni, slipping up and down the staircase, gliding down halls, in and out of fireplaces. He appeared briefly in mirrors. He drifted past balconies to the tower Browning had thought of building at Asolo. He wavered for a few minutes near its crenellated peak before moving in a slow spiral down along its edges to its base.

Browning had just enough time to wish for the drama and the luxury of a death by water. Then his fading attention was caught by the rhythmic bump of a moored gondola against the terrace below. The boat was waiting, he knew, to take his body to the cemetery at San Michele when the afternoon had passed. Shelley had said somewhere that a gondola was a butterfly emerging from a coffin-chrysalis.

Suntreader
. Still beyond his grasp. The eagle on the ceiling lost in unfocused fog.
A moulted feather, an eagle feather, well I forget the rest
. The drowned man’s body separated into parts and moved slowly out of Browning’s mind. The old poet contented himself with the thought of one last journey by water. The coffin boat, the chrysalis. Across the Laguna Morta to San Michele. All that cool white marble in exchange for the shifting sands of Lerici.

Jane Urquhart was born in Little Long Lac, Ontario, and grew up in Toronto. She is the author of six internationally acclaimed novels:
The Whirlpool
, which received Le prix du meilleur livre étranger (Best Foreign Book Award) in France;
Changing Heaven; Away
, winner of the Trillium Award and a finalist for the prestigious International
IMPAC
Dublin Literary Award;
The Underpainter
, winner of the Governor General’s Award and a finalist for the Rogers Communications Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize;
The Stone Carvers
, which was a finalist for The Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Award, and longlisted for the Booker Prize; and
A Map of Glass
, a finalist for a regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book. She is also the author of a collection of short fiction,
Storm Glass
, and four books of poetry,
I Am Walking in the Garden of His Imaginary Palace, False Shuffles, The Little Flowers of Madame de Montespan
, and
Some Other Garden
. Her work has been translated into numerous foreign languages. Urquhart has received the Marian Engel Award, and is a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France and an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Urquhart has received numerous honorary doctorates from Canadian universities and has been writer-in-residence at the University of Ottawa and at Memorial University of Newfoundland, and, during the winter and spring of 1997, she held the Presidential Writer-in-Residence Fellowship at the University of Toronto. She has also given readings and lectures in Canada, Britain, Europe, the U.S.A., and Australia.

Jane Urquhart lives in southwestern Ontario.