Slow Man Page 10

  He blames Mrs Costello for the blindfold as he blames her for much else, but he will not take it off, not yet, will not strip his vision bare.

  With a rustle (what can she be wearing that makes so much noise?) the woman sits down at his side – sits on his hand, in fact. For a moment, until she lifts herself and he can withdraw it, his hand is under her bottom in the most vulgar of ways. Not a large woman but a large bottom nevertheless, large and soft. But then the blind are inactive, do not walk, do not run, do not ride bicycles. All that energy pent up with nowhere to vent itself. No wonder she is restless. No wonder she is ready to visit a strange man all alone.

  Now that his hands are free, he can touch her as she touched him. But is that what he wants to do? Does he want to explore those eyes or anywhere near them? Does he want to be – what is the word? – appalled? The appalling: that which turns one’s stomach, unmans one, leaves one pale and shaking. Can one be appalled by what one cannot see but what the fingertips report, even the fingertips of a novice like himself in the land of the blind?

  Uncertainly he stretches out a hand. He meets a hard cluster of something or other, bubbles, baubles, berries sewn up in sheaths. Her throat or her bodice, it must be. An inch higher, her chin. The chin firm, pointed; then a short jaw, then the beginning of furze or hair that feels dark to him, just as her skin feels dark; then something hard, an earpiece. She is wearing glasses, glasses that curve back across her cheekbones, perhaps the same dark glasses she wore in the lift.

  ‘Your name is Marianna, Mrs Costello tells me.’

  ‘Marianna.’

  He says Marianna, she says Marianna, but it is not the same name. His Marianna is still coloured by Marijana: it is heavier than hers, more solid. Of her Marianna he can say only that it is liquid, silver: not as quick as quicksilver, more like running water, a furling stream. And is this what it is like, being blind: having to weigh each word in one’s hand, weigh each tone, fumble for equivalents that sound all too much (a furling stream) like bad poetry?

  ‘Not the French Marianne?’

  ‘No.’

  No. Not French. A pity. France would be something in common, like a blanket to deploy over the pair of them.

  The flour-and-water paste does its work surprisingly well. Even though his pupils must have dilated to their fullest, he is in a world of utter blackness. Where did Costello get the idea from? From a book? A recipe handed down from the ancients?

  With his fingers still in her somewhat curly hair he draws her towards him, and she comes. Her face is pressed to his, the dark glasses too, though her fists are raised, two knobs keeping her breast apart from him.

  ‘Thank you for your visit,’ he says. ‘Mrs Costello mentioned your present troubles. I am sorry.’

  She says nothing. He can feel a light trembling run through her.

  ‘There is no need,’ he goes on, but then does not know what comes next. What is there need of, what is there no need of? Something to do with their being man and woman; something to do with yielding to, to resort to the Costello woman’s term, lust. But between where they are, man and woman, and the exercise of lust a veritable chasm yawns. ‘There is no need,’ he begins again, ‘for us to adhere to any script. No need to do anything we do not wish. We are free agents.’

  She is still shivering, shivering or trembling like a bird. ‘Come to me,’ he says, and obediently she sidles closer. It must be difficult for her. He must aid her, they are in this together.

  The strings and berries and baubles at her throat turn out to be purely decorative. The dress opens via a zip at the back, which helpfully goes all the way down to the waist. His fingers are slow and clumsy. If she had consented to sit on his hand a while longer his fingers would have warmed up. Animal heat. As for the brassière, it is well constructed, sturdy, the sort of thing he imagines Carmelites would wear. Big breasts, a big bottom, yet slight for the rest. Marianna. Who is here, says the Costello woman, not out of solicitude for him, but for her own sake. Because there is a thirst in her that cannot be slaked. Because of her visage, her devastated face, that he is warned not to look upon and perhaps not even touch, because it would turn him to ice.

  ‘I suggest we don’t talk too much,’ he says. ‘Nevertheless there is one circumstance I should mention, for practical reasons. I have had no experience of this sort of thing since my accident. I may require a little help.’

  ‘I know that. Mrs Costello told me.’

  ‘Mrs Costello does not know everything. She cannot know what I do not know.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Yes? What does it mean, yes?

  He doubts profoundly that he ever photographed this woman solo. If he had, he would not have forgotten her. Perhaps she was part of a group, in the days when he visited schools to take group photographs, that is possible; but not alone. The image he has of her comes only from the lift and from what his fingers tell him now. To her he must be even more of a jumble of sense-data: the cold of his hands; the roughness of his skin; the rasp of his voice; and an odour probably unpleasing to her supersensitive nostrils. Is that enough for her to construct the image of a man from? Is it an image she would be prepared to give herself to? Why did she agree to come, sight unseen? It is like a primitive experiment in biology – like bringing different species together to see if they will mate, fox and whale, cricket and marmoset.

  ‘Your money,’ he says. ‘I am putting it on this side table, in an envelope. Four hundred and fifty dollars. Is that acceptable?’

  He feels her nod.

  A minute passes. Nothing more happens. A one-legged man and a partially disrobed woman waiting for what? For the click of a camera shutter? Australian Gothic. Matilda and her bloke, worn down by a lifetime of waltzing, parts of their bodies falling off or falling out, face the photographer one last time.

  The woman’s trembling has not ceased. He can swear it has infected him too: a light trilling of the hand that might be put down to age but is in fact something else, fear or anticipation (but which?).

  If they are to proceed with the act for which she has been paid, for which she has accepted payment, she must overcome her present embarrassment and move on to the next step. She has been forewarned of his bad leg, of his untrustworthy undercarriage in general. Since he would find it hard to straddle a woman, it would be best if she were to straddle him. While she is negotiating that passage, he will have problems of his own to wrestle with, problems of quite another order. Perhaps, among the blind, there grow up intuitions of beauty based solely on touch. In the realm of the unseen, however, he is still groping his way. Beauty without the sight of beauty is not yet, to him, imaginable. The episode in the lift, during which his attention was held as much by the old woman as by her, has left behind in his memory only the sketchiest of outlines. When to a wide-brimmed hat, dark glasses, the curve of an averted face he tries to add heavy breasts and spreading, unnaturally soft buttocks, like volumes of liquid trapped in silk balloons, he cannot make the parts cohere. How can he even be sure they belong to the same woman?

  Gently he tries to draw the woman to him. Though not resisting, she turns her face away, either because she is unwilling to yield her lips or because she does not want to give him a chance to lift off her glasses and explore what lies beneath – does not want it because where mutilation is concerned men are notoriously queasy.

  How long since she lost her sight? Can he decently ask? And can he then decently go on to the next question: Has she been loved since it happened? Is it experience that has taught her her devastated eyes will kill off a man’s desire?

  Eros. Why does the sight of the beautiful call eros into life? Why does the spectacle of the hideous strangle desire? Does intercourse with the beautiful elevate us, make better people of us, or is it by embracing the diseased, the mutilated, the repulsive that we improve ourselves? What questions! Is that why the Costello woman has brought the two of them t
ogether: not for the vulgar comedy of a man and a woman with parts of their bodies missing doing their best to interlock, but in order that, once the sexual business has been got out of the way, they can hold a philosophy class, lying in each other’s arms discoursing about beauty, love, and goodness?

  And somehow or other, in the midst of all of this – the fretting, the embarrassment, the averting, the philosophising, to say nothing of an attempt on his part to loosen his tie, which has begun to choke him (why on earth is he wearing a tie?) – somehow, clumsily yet not as clumsily as might have been, shamefacedly yet not so shamefacedly as to paralyse them, they manage to slip into it, into the physical act to which they have willy-nilly contracted themselves, an act which while not the act of sex as generally understood is nevertheless an act of sex, and which, despite the truncated haunch on the one hand and the blasted eyes on the other, proceeds with some dispatch from beginning to middle to end, that is to say in all its natural parts.

  What disquieted him most in Costello’s account of Marianna was what she said about the hunger or thirst raging in her body. He has never been fond of immoderacy, immodesty, wild motions, grunts and shouts and cries. But Marianna seems to know how to contain herself. Whatever is going on inside her she keeps to herself; and, once they have concluded, she swiftly makes everything decent again, more or less. The sole intimation he has of either raging thirst or raging hunger comes in the form of an unusual but not unpleasing heat at the core of her body, as though her womb or perhaps her heart were glowing with a fire of its own.

  Though the sofa was built neither for sexual coupling nor for subsequent philosophic languor, and though, without a covering, they are soon going to be chilled, there is no question yet of groping their way to a proper bed in a proper bedroom.

  ‘Marianna,’ he says, testing the name on his tongue, tasting the two ns: ‘I know that is your name, but is it what people call you? There isn’t another name you use?’

  ‘Marianna. That is it. That is all.’

  ‘Very well,’ he says. ‘Marianna, Mrs Costello says we have met before. When was that?’

  ‘A long time ago. You took my photograph. It was for my birthday. You don’t remember?’

  ‘I don’t and can’t remember because I don’t know what you look like. And it can’t be that you remember me because you don’t know what I look like. Where did it take place, this portrait session?’

  ‘In your studio.’

  ‘And where was the studio?’

  She is silent. ‘It is too long ago,’ she says at last. ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘On the other hand, our paths did cross much more recently. We shared a lift at the Royal Hospital. An elevator. Did Mrs Costello mention that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What else did she say?’

  ‘Just that you were lonely.’

  ‘Lonely. How interesting. Mrs Costello is a close friend of yours?’

  ‘No, not close.’

  ‘What then?’

  There is a long silence. He strokes her through her clothes, up and down, thigh, side, breast. What a pleasure, and how unexpected, to have the freedom of a woman’s body again, even if the woman is invisible!

  ‘Did she just walk in on you?’ he says. ‘She just walked in on me.’

  He feels her shake her head slowly from side to side.

  ‘Does she intend, do you think, that you and I should become a couple? For her entertainment perhaps? The halt leading the blind?’

  The remark is meant lightly, but he can feel her stiffen. He hears the lips part, hears her swallow, and all of a sudden she is crying.

  ‘I am sorry,’ he says. He reaches out to touch her cheek. It is bathed in wetness. At least, he thinks, she has tear ducts left. ‘I am sorry, truly. But we are grown people, so why are we letting someone we barely know dictate our lives? That is what I ask myself.’

  She gives a gasp that is presumably a laugh, and the laugh brings on sobs. She sits up beside him, half dressed, sobbing freely, shaking her head from side to side. Now is surely the time to slip off the blindfold, wipe the muck from his eyes, behold her as she is. But he does not. He waits. He tarries. He delays.

  She blows her nose on a tissue she seems to have brought with her, clears her throat. ‘I thought,’ she says, ‘this was what you wanted.’

  ‘It is, make no mistake about it, it is. Nevertheless, the idea came from our friend Elizabeth. The first impulse. She issues instructions, we follow. Even when there is no one to see that we obey.’

  See. Not the right word, but he lets it stand. She must be used to it by now, to people who say ‘see’ when they mean something else.

  ‘Unless,’ he goes on, ‘she is still in the room, observing, checking up.’

  ‘No,’ Marianna says, ‘there is no one here.’

  There is no one here. Being blind, and therefore attuned to the subtler emanations of living beings, she must be right. Nevertheless, the feeling has not left him that he need only reach down and his fingers will encounter Elizabeth Costello, stretched out on the carpet like a dog, watching and waiting.

  ‘Our friend advocated this’ – he waves a vague hand – ‘because in her eyes it represents the crossing of a threshold. She is of the opinion that until I have crossed a certain threshold I am caught in limbo, unable to grow. That is the hypothesis she is testing out in my case. She probably has another hypothesis to cover you.’

  Even as he speaks he knows it is a lie. Elizabeth Costello has never used the word growth in his hearing. Growth comes out of the self-help manuals. God knows what Elizabeth Costello really wants, for him or for herself or for this Marianna; God knows to what theory of life or love she really holds; God knows what will happen next.

  ‘Anyway, having crossed her threshold, we are now free to proceed to higher and better things.’

  He is just talking, making the best of an uncomfortable situation, trying to cheer up a woman suffering the tristesse that descends after coitus with a stranger. From his envelope of darkness, not yet giving up hope of forming a picture of her, he reaches out again to touch her face; and in the act plunges into a dark gulf of his own. All his larkiness deserts him. Why, why did he put enough trust in the Costello woman to go through with this performance, which seems to him now less rash than simply stupid? And what on earth is this poor blind unlucky woman going to do with herself in these less than welcoming surroundings while she waits for her mentor in her mercy to return and release her? Did Costello really believe that a few minutes of inflamed physical congress could like a gas expand to fill up a whole night? Did she believe she could throw two strangers together, neither of them young, one positively old, old and cold, and expect them to behave like Romeo and Juliet? How naïve! And she a noted literary artist too! And this damned paste which, though she swore it was harmless, is beginning to irritate his eyes as it dries out: how could she have imagined that being blinded with flour and water would change his character, make a new man of him? Blindness is a handicap pure and simple. A man without sight is a lesser man, as a man with one leg is a lesser man, not a new man. This poor woman she has sent him is a lesser woman too, less than she must have been before. Two lesser beings, handicapped, diminished: how could she have imagined a spark of the divine would be struck between them, or any spark at all?

  As for the woman herself, growing colder minute by minute at his side, what can be running through her mind? What a load of poppycock she must have been told to persuade her to come knocking at the door of a strange man and offering herself to him! Just as in his case there was a long preamble to this lamentable encounter, a preamble stretching far enough back into the past to constitute a book in its own right, beginning with Wayne Blight and Paul Rayment setting off from their respective homes that fatal winter morning, oblivious as yet of each other’s existence, so in her case there must be a prelude beginning with the vi
rus or the sunspot or the bad gene or the needle or whatever else is to blame for her blinding, and proceeding step by step to a meeting with a plausible old woman (all the more plausible if you have only the voice to go by) telling you she has the means to quench your burning thirst if only you will take a taxi to a café called Alfredo’s in North Adelaide, here is the fare, I am putting it in your hand, no need to be nervous, the man in question is quite harmless, merely lonely, he will treat you as a callgirl and pay you for your time, and I will be there anyway, hovering in the background, watching over you – if you have only the voice to go by and cannot see the mad glint in the eye.

  An experiment, that is what it amounts to, an idle, biologico-literary experiment. Cricket and marmoset. And they fell for it, both of them, he in his way, she in hers!

  ‘I must leave,’ says the woman, the marmoset. ‘The taxi will be waiting.’

  ‘If you say so,’ he says. ‘How do you know about the taxi?’

  ‘Mrs Costello ordered it.’

  ‘Mrs Costello?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Costello.’

  ‘How does Mrs Costello know when you will need a taxi?’

  She shrugs.

  ‘Well, Mrs Costello takes good care of you. Can I pay for the taxi?’

  ‘No, no, it’s all included.’

  ‘Well then, give my greetings to Mrs Costello. And be careful on the way down. The stairs can be slippery.’

  He sits still, containing himself, while she dresses. The instant the door closes behind her, however, he whips off the blindfold and claws at his eyes. But the paste has caked and hardened. If he tears at it too hard he will lose his eyelashes. He curses: he will have to soak it off.

  Sixteen

  ‘She came to me as you came to me,’ says Costello. ‘A woman of darkness, a woman in darkness. Take up the story of such a one: words in my sleeping ear, spoken by what in the old days we would have called an angel calling me out to a wrestling match. Therefore no, I have no idea where she lives, your Marianna. All my dealings with her have been on the telephone. If you would like her to repeat her visit, I can give you her number.’