Slow Man Page 21

  ‘A foreigner by nature? No, that is not it, don’t put the blame on your nature. You have a perfectly good nature, if a little underdeveloped. No, the more I listen the more convinced I am that the key to your character lies in your speech. You speak like a book. Once upon a time you were a pale, well-behaved little boy – I can just see you – who took books too seriously. And you still are.’

  ‘I still am what? Pale? Well-behaved? Underdeveloped?’

  ‘A little boy afraid of sounding funny when you open your mouth. Let me make a proposal, Paul. Lock up this flat and bid farewell to Adelaide. Adelaide is too much like a graveyard. There is no more life for you here. Come and live with me in Carlton instead. I will give you language lessons. I will teach you how to speak from the heart. One two-hour lesson a day, six days a week; on the seventh day we can rest. I will even cook for you. Not as expertly as Marijana, but serviceably enough. Then after dinner, should the spirit move you, you can tell me more stories from your treasure-hoard, which I will afterwards tell back to you in a form so accelerated and improved that you will hardly recognise them. What else? No rough pleasures – you will be relieved to hear that. As clean as the blessed angels we will be. In all other respects I will take care of you; and perhaps in return you will learn to take care of me. When the appointed day arrives, you can be the one to close my eyelids and stuff cotton wool up my nostrils and recite a brief prayer over me. Or vice versa, if I am the one left behind. How does that sound to you?’

  ‘It sounds like marriage.’

  ‘Yes it is, marriage of a kind. Companionate marriage. Paul and Elizabeth. Elizabeth and Paul. Companions on the way. Or if Carlton doesn’t appeal to you, we could buy a camper van and tour the continent taking in the sights. We could even catch a plane to France. How about that? You could show me your old haunts, the Galeries Lafayette, Tarascon, the Pyrenees. No end of options. Come on, what do you say?’

  She may be Irish, but she sounds sincere, or half sincere. Now his turn.

  He rises and stands propped against the table before her. Can he, for once, make his voice sing? He closes his eyes, empties his mind, waits for words to come.

  ‘Why me, Elizabeth?’ come the words. ‘Why, of all the many people in the world, me?’

  The same old words, the same disappointing old song. He cannot get beyond it. Yet until he has an answer to his question, whatever in the heart does the singing will be clogged.

  Elizabeth Costello is silent.

  ‘I am dross, Elizabeth, base metal. I am not redeemable. I am of no use to you, to anyone, of no value. Too pale, too cold, too frightened. What made you choose me? What gave you the idea you could make anything of me? Why do you stay with me? Speak!’

  She speaks.

  ‘You were made for me, Paul, as I was made for you. Will that do for the present, or do you want me to give it to you plenu voce, in full voice?’

  ‘Speak it in so full a voice that even a poor dullard like me can understand.’

  She clears her throat. ‘For me alone Paul Rayment was born and I for him. His is the power of leading, mine of following; his of acting, mine of writing. More?’

  ‘No, that is enough. Now let me ask you straight out, Mrs Costello: Are you real?’

  ‘Am I real? I eat, I sleep, I suffer, I go to the bathroom. I catch cold. Of course I am real. As real as you.’

  ‘Please be serious for once. Please answer me: Am I alive or am I dead? Did something happen to me on Magill Road that I have failed to grasp?’

  ‘And am I the shade assigned to welcome you to the afterlife – is that what you are asking? No, rest assured, a poor forked creature, that is all I am, no different from yourself. An old woman who scribbles away, page after page, day after day, damned if she knows why. If there is a presiding spirit – and I don’t think there is – then it is me he stands over, with his lash, not you. No slacking, young Elizabeth Costello! he says, and gives me a lick of the whip. Get on with the job now! No, this is a very ordinary story, very ordinary indeed, with just three dimensions, length, breadth and height, the same as ordinary life, and it is a very ordinary proposal I am making to you. Come back with me to Melbourne, to my nice old house in Carlton. You will like it, it has many mansions. Forget about Mrs Jokić, you don’t stand a dog’s chance with her. Take a chance on me. I’ll be your best copine, the copine of your last days. We will share our crusts while we still have teeth. What do you say?’

  ‘What do I say from the word-box I carry around with me or from the heart?’

  ‘Ah, you’ve got me there, what a quick fellow you are! From the heart, Paul, just for once.’

  He has been watching her mouth as she speaks, it is a habit of his: other people watch the eyes, he watches the mouth. No rough pleasures, she said. But right now he cannot help imagining what it would be like to kiss that mouth, with its dry, perhaps even withered lips and the trace of down above. Does companionate marriage include kissing? He drops his eyes; if he were less polite he would shudder.

  And she sees it. She is not a higher being, but she sees it. ‘I bet that as a little boy you didn’t like it when your mother kissed you,’ she says softly. ‘Am I right? Ducked your head, let her peck you on the forehead, nothing more? And your Dutch stepfather not at all? Wanted to be a little man from the beginning, your own little man, owing nothing to anyone; self-made. Did they disgust you, your mother and her new husband – their breath, their smell, their pawing and fondling? How on earth could you expect someone like Marijana Jokić to love a man with such an aversion to the physical?’

  ‘I have no aversion to the physical,’ he protests coldly. What he wants to add, but does not, is: My aversion is to the ugly. ‘What do you think life has consisted in ever since Magill Road but being rammed into the physical day after day? It is a testament to my faith in the physical that I have not done away with myself, that I am still here.’

  Yet even as he speaks it is clear to him what the woman meant about the box of words. Done away with myself! he thinks. How artificial! How insincere! Like all the confessions she leads me into! And at the very same moment he is thinking: If we had had but five minutes more, that afternoon, if Ljuba had not come prowling like a little watchdog, Marijana would have kissed me. It was coming, I am sure, I felt it in my bones. Would have bent down and ever so lightly touched her lips to my shoulder. Then all would have been well. I would have taken her to me; she and I would have known what it was to lie side by side, breast to breast, in each other’s arms, breathing each other’s breath. Home country.

  ‘Would you not concede, Paul’ (the woman is still talking), ‘that I have kept my humour exceedingly well, from the day I turned up on your doorstep to the present? Not a curse, not a cross word, lots of jokes instead, and a leavening of Irish blarney. Let me ask you: Do you think that is how I am by nature?’

  He holds his tongue. His mind is elsewhere. He does not care how Elizabeth Costello is by nature.

  ‘I am a tetchy old creature by nature, Paul, and given to the blackest rages. A bit of a viper, in fact. It is only because I vowed to myself to be good that I have been such a light burden for you to bear. But it has been a battle, believe me. Many is the time I have had to restrain myself from flaring up. Do you think what I have said is the worst that can be said of you – that you are slow as a tortoise and fastidious to a fault? There is much beyond that, believe me. What do we call it when someone knows the worst about us, the worst and most wounding, and does not come out with it but on the contrary suppresses it and continues to smile on us and make little jokes? We call it affection. Where else in the world, at this late stage, are you going to find affection, you ugly old man? Yes, I am familiar with that word too, ugly. We are both of us ugly, Paul, old and ugly. As much as ever would we like to hold in our arms the beauty of all the world. It never wanes in us, that yearning. But the beauty of all the world does not want any of us. So we have
to make do with less, a great deal less. In fact, we have to accept what is on offer or else go hungry. So when a kindly godmother offers to whisk us away from our dreary surroundings, from our hopeless, our pathetic, unrealisable dreams, we ought to think twice about spurning her.

  ‘I will give you a day, Paul, twenty-four hours, to rethink. If you refuse, if you insist on holding to your present dilatory course, then I will show you what I am capable of, I will show you how I can spit.’

  His watch shows 3.15. Three hours yet to dawn. How on earth will he kill three hours?

  There is a light on in the living-room. Elizabeth Costello lies asleep at the table she has annexed, her head cradled in her arms atop a mess of papers.

  His inclination is to leave her strictly alone. The last thing he wants to do is wake her and open himself to more of her barbs. He is weary of her barbs. Half the time he feels like a poor old bear in the Colosseum, not knowing which way to turn. The death of a thousand cuts.

  Nevertheless.

  Nevertheless, ever so gently, he lifts her and slips a cushion in under her head.

  In a fairy story, this would be the moment when the foul hag turns into a fair princess. But this is not a fairy story, evidently. Since the exploratory handclasp when they met, he and Elizabeth Costello have had no physical contact. Her hair has a lifeless feel to it, a lack of spring. And beneath that hair is the skull, within which activities go on that he would prefer not to know about.

  If the object of his care were a child – Ljuba, for instance, or even handsome, heart-breaking, treacherous Drago – he might call the act tender. But in the case of this woman it is not tender. It is merely what one old person might do for another old person who is not well. Humane.

  Presumably, like everyone else, Elizabeth Costello wants to be loved. And like everyone else faces the end gnawed by a feeling that there is something she has missed. Is that what she is looking for in him: whatever it is she has missed? Is that the answer to his recurring question? If so, how ludicrous. How can he be the missing piece when all his life he has been missing himself? Man overboard! Lost in a choppy sea off a strange coast.

  Somewhere in the distance are the two Costello children he read about in the library, children she does not talk about, probably because they do not love her, or do not love her enough. Presumably, like him, they have had enough of Elizabeth Costello’s barbs. He does not blame them. If he had a mother like her he would keep his distance too.

  All alone in Melbourne in an empty house, entering upon her last days, starved for love, and to whom does she turn for relief but a man in another state, a retired portraitist, an utter stranger, yet one who has suffered a blow of his own and has his own need of love. If there is a human, a humane explanation for her situation, that must be it. Almost at random she has lighted on him, as a bee might alight on a flower or a wasp on a worm; and somehow, in ways so obscure, so labyrinthine that the mind baulks at exploring them, the need to be loved and the storytelling, that is to say the mess of papers on the table, are connected.

  He glances at what she is writing. In fat letters: (EC thinks) Australian novelist – what a fate! What does the man have running in his veins? Under the words, a line across the page scored savagely into the paper. Then: After the meal they play a game of cards. Use the game to bring out their differences. Blanka wins. A narrow, intense intelligence. Drago no good at cards – too careless, too confident. Marijana smiling, relaxed, proud of her offspring. PR tries to use the game to make friends with Blanka, but she draws back. Her icy disapproval.

  A meal and then a game of cards. PR and Blanka. Are they to be a family together after all, he with the ice-water in his veins and the Jokićs, so full of blood? What else is Costello plotting in that busy head of hers?

  The scribbler sleeps, the character prowls around looking for things to occupy himself with. A joke, but for the fact that there is no one around to catch it.

  The scribbler’s busy head lies at rest on the pillow. From her chest, if he listens carefully, a faint rattle as the air pumps in, pumps out. He switches off the lamp. He seems to be turning into the kind of person who falls asleep early and wakes up in the dark hours; she would seem to be the kind who stays up late, spinning her fantasies into the night. How could they possibly set up house together?

  Twenty-nine

  ‘Not an unannounced visit,’ he says. ‘I don’t like people visiting me unannounced and I don’t make unannounced visits myself.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ says Elizabeth Costello, ‘break your rule just once. It is so much more spontaneous than writing letters, so much more neighbourly. How else will you get to see your mystical bride on home ground, chez elle?’

  His mind goes back to his childhood, to Ballarat in the days before the spread of telephones, when the four of them would get into the Dutchman’s blue Renault van on a Sunday afternoon and set off to pay unannounced visits. What tedium! The only visits he remembers with any pleasure were to the smallholding of their stepfather’s horticultural friend Andrea Mittiga. It was at the Mittigas’, among the spider webs in the cramped space behind the huge water tank, that with Prinny Mittiga he carried out his first breathless explorations into the difference between male and female.

  ‘Come back next Sunday, promise,’ Prinny Mittiga would whisper when the visit was over, when, with the raspberry juice drunk and the almond cake eaten, they were getting back into the van, weighed down with tomatoes or plums or oranges from the Mittigas’ garden, for the drive back to Wirramunda Avenue. And he would have to shrug. ‘Dunno,’ he would have to say, his face impassive, though he burned to go on with the lessons.

  ‘Paulie and Prinny were playing doctor again,’ announced his sister from their makeshift seat in the back of the van.

  ‘Weren’t!’ he protested, and dug her in the ribs.

  ‘Allez, les enfants, soyez sages!’ admonished his mother. As for the Dutchman, hunched over the wheel, dodging the bumps and holes in the Mittigas’ road, he never listened.

  The Dutchman drove at bottom speed, in fourth gear. That was his theory of driving, learned in Holland. When they came to hills, the engine of the van would hammer and choke; other cars would queue up behind and hoot. The hooting had no effect on him. ‘Toujours pressés, pressés!’ he would say in his grating Dutch voice. ‘Ils sont fous! Ils gaspillent de l’essence, c’est tout!’ He was not going to gaspiller his own essence for anybody. So they would crawl on, into the dark, with no lights, to save the battery.

  ‘Oh la la, ils gaspillent de l’essence!’ he and his sister would whisper to each other in the back of the van that smelled of rotten dahlia bulbs, rasping their consonants in the barbaric Dutch way, snorting with laughter, holding back their snorts, while the proper cars, the Holdens and Chevrolets and Studebakers, accelerated past. ‘Merde, merde, merde!’

  The Dutchman had taken to wearing shorts. Nothing could be more embarrassing than the Dutchman in his baggy shorts with his pale legs and his ankle-length check socks among the real Australians. Why did their mother ever marry him? Did she let him do it to her in her bedroom in the dark? When they thought of the Dutchman with his thing doing it to their mother they could explode with shame and outrage.

  The Dutchman’s Renault van was the only one in Ballarat. He had bought it second-hand from some other Dutchman. Renault, l’auto la plus économique, he would enounce, though in fact there was always something wrong with the van, it was always in the repair shop waiting for some part or other to arrive from Melbourne.

  No Renault vans here in Adelaide. No Prinny Mittiga. No playing doctor. Only the real thing. Should they pay a last unannounced visit, for old times’ sake? How will the Jokićs take it? Will they slam the door in the faces of their surprise visitors; or, coming from the same world, broadly speaking, as the Mittigas, a world gone or going, will they make them welcome and offer them tea and cake and send them home laden with gift
s?

  ‘A real expedition,’ says Elizabeth Costello. ‘The dark continent of Munno Para. I’m sure it will take you out of yourself.’

  ‘If we visit Munno Para it will not be in order to take me out of myself,’ he says. ‘There is nothing in me that I need to escape from.’

  ‘And so good of you to invite me along,’ continues Elizabeth Costello. ‘Would you not prefer to go by yourself?’

  Always gay, he thinks. How tiring it must be to live with someone so resolutely gay.

  ‘I would not dream of going without you,’ he says.

  Years ago he used to cycle through Munno Para on the way to Gawler. Then it was just a few houses dotted around a filling station, with bare scrub behind. Now tracts of new housing stretch as far as the eye can see.

  Seven Narrapinga Close: that was the address on the forms he had to sign for Marijana. The taxi drops them in front of a colonial-style house with green lawn around an austere little rectangular Japanese garden: a slab of black marble with water trickling down its face, rushes, grey pebbles. (‘So real!’ enthuses Elizabeth Costello, getting out of the car. ‘So authentic! Would you like me to give you a hand?’)

  The driver passes him his crutches; he pays the fare.

  The door is opened a hand’s width; they are inspected suspiciously by a girl with a pale, stolid face and a silver ring in one nostril. Blanka, he presumes, the middle child, the shoplifter, his unwilling protégée. He had half hoped she might be a beauty like her sister. But no, she is not.

  ‘Hello,’ he says. ‘I am Paul Rayment. This is Mrs Costello. We were hoping to see your mother.’

  Without a word the girl disappears. They wait and wait on the doorstep. Nothing happens.

  ‘I reckon we go in,’ says Elizabeth Costello at last.

  They find themselves in a living-room furnished in white leather, dominated to one side by a large television screen and to the other by a huge abstract painting, a swirl of orange and lime green and yellow against a white field. A fan spins overhead. No dolls in folk costume, no sunsets over the Adriatic, nothing to put one in mind of the old country.