Brian Aldiss - Somewhere East of Life

Nor did he.

Burnell took a glutinous pace or two to his right. He began to begin to paddle towards that dull deceitful promise of escape. Violet was the vision reviving there. Fading into sight came a magnificent Palladian façade: a stream of perfection that scarcely could brook human visitation. Doric columns, porticoes, blind doorways. No man – however worthy of this unwedding cake – was there to answer Burnell’s gurgle for help.

If the burrow to the left represented the squalors of the subconscious, to the right towered the refrigerated glory of the super-ego.

Still Burnell swam for it, convulsing his body into action.

‘Mountebank!’ he screamed as he went.

But the black monster was there, reaching out a hand, reaching him. Now Burnell’s scream was even higher, even more sincere. The thing caught him by his hair. Snatched him up …

… and bit off his head.

Blanche Bretesche was drinking steadily. She was in her Madrid apartment with friends. It was late. The red wine of Andalucia was slipping down her red gullet as she talked to her friend Teresa Cabaroccas. The two women were discussing love in an age without faith. They’d been in a Madrid back street, watching a performance by a once famous flamenco dancer, now a little past it and married to an innkeeper. The singing had been in progress after midnight.

‘Oh, one more damned passionate wail!’ – suddenly Blanche had screamed and stood up. She practically dragged Teresa from the crowded tavern.

‘Why have these people some kind of licence to yell their sufferings?’

‘The audience empathizes, Blanche. You can wallow in it for a bit, can’t you? And with the suffering – that spirited arrogance! Oh, it’s the arrogance I admire, not the suffering. The defiance of poverty, misery, betrayal, fate. The body says it, not just the voice …’ Annoyed at being pulled from the entertainment she had not greatly enjoyed, Teresa was drinking as rapidly as Blanche.

‘Why shouldn’t I get up and wail my sufferings?’ Blanche asked. ‘My bloody discontents? Wail them from – oh, the square, the mountains, the TV studios …’ She kicked her shoes to the far end of the room and put her bare feet up on the table.

‘But your whole life – that speaks out for women, for fulfilment.’

‘Fulfilment. I spit on the word. When was anyone really fulfilled? When did anyone ever have enough? Tell me that. Go on, tell me when anyone ever had enough. I mean there’s not enough to have. The imagination’s always greedy for more. Like that Madame Fotril when I was a girl – she lived next door to us and she ate her five-year-old daughter, cooked – with cabbage, of all vile things. Cabbage! I’ve never eaten cabbage since. The mere thought makes me sick. And then my parents took me with them to the funeral. Funeral! What could have been in the coffin, I kept asking myself. I was possibly twelve, just growing breasts like unripe apricots and hair between the legs, and all I could think was that maybe the priest had thrown the saucepan into the coffin with the bones.

‘There was a woman – a fearsome woman – who wasn’t afraid of her imagination, who demanded enough, whatever it cost. Well, I feel like that. It’s love – no, it’s not really even love, it’s wanting something I can’t have, almost like a principle, the principle that we should never ever in this life be satisfied—’

‘Oh, calm down, we’ve all got problems,’ said Teresa. She got up and walked unsteadily to the balcony, trying to cool her cheek against a stone pillar. ‘Who is this guy you were talking about, anyway? A Hungarian?’

‘Not a Hungarian,’ said Blanche. She looked down into her glass, afraid to say ‘English’ in case her Spanish friend laughed. She didn’t wish to spoil the drama of the moment.

A pompous-looking man had accompanied them to the performance. He sat in a cane lounger with a lager on the table by his side, giving every appearance of lassitude. When he could be sure of being heard, he said, in his carefully enunciated tone, ‘What we’re talking about here in a secular age is a hunger for God. God or the Breast. You can have enough sex, Blanche, believe it or believe it not. You can never have enough of God. God’s the giant breast in the sky.’

Only Teresa felt qualified to comment on these remarks. From her vantage point on the balcony, overlooking the square, she said, ‘It’s a divine dissatisfaction.’

The man stretched his legs. ‘I wouldn’t put it like that, dear. More gross, quite honestly, than divine. Do you realize how much of every day is taken up with food, with the belly? The pursuit of food, the eating of food, the recovering from its after-effects? The stomach’s as much a tyrant as the genitals.’

‘Not in my case,’ said Teresa, who was dieting.

Taking a rein on herself, Blanche said in a low desperate voice, ‘I was a friend of his wife’s. I loved him then … Was it just a case of “can’t have”? He looks so lovely. And he thinks I look lovely. And he’s good and pleasant to be with in bed. Isn’t pleasant better than good? The number of men I know who’re good in bed and nothing else. Good – and shits. Roy … Roy’s a decent man, and when I saw him again—’

‘Did that woman really eat her daughter or are you just tipsy and making it all up?’

‘If only he wasn’t so caught up with the past …’ Blanche half rose. She set her glass down unsteadily on the marble top of the table.

‘Christ!’ she said. She sat down again, suddenly sober, suddenly bereft of words. Somewhere, a long way away, an evil thing had befallen her lover.

You don’t find it odd to discover gradually that you’re sort of running. Or more a jog-trot. You can see the legs going, and they’re yours. And the scrubby grass below your shoes, resilient, springing up again when you’ve passed. That’s not odd. But something’s odd.

Imagine yourself in an art cinema. The movie begins without titles or proem. The opening shot is of some character walking or jogging across a featureless landscape. Photography: grainy, bleached. Camera: perhaps hand-held in an old-fashioned twentieth-century way.

The sequence immediately holds your interest, although there’s little enough to see. Perhaps some kind of tribal memory comes back, if anyone believes in tribal memory – or anything else – any more. Our ancestors were great walkers, right back to the Ice Age and beyond. If you can walk along a glacier with bare feet, you deserve to succeed.

Now imagine you’re not in a comfortable seat watching the movie. You are that jogging character. Only you’re not in a movie. You’re real, or what we label real for convenience, according to our limited sensory equipment. (Anyone who walks on a glacier with bare feet needs his head looking at …)

Head … Yes, that’s still there …

You’re not surprised even at that.

Your life appears to have begun anew, and you’re progressing across what will turn out to be … a rather unappetizing stretch of England … Salisbury Plain. Salisbury Plain is a) flat, b) plain, c) cold, and d) preparing to receive sweeping gusts of rain. You register these facts one by one.

But walking is no trouble. It’s everything else that’s trouble.

Like how you got where you are. Like what happened. Like who you are. Even minor details like – where do you think you’re going?

Night is closing in. It comes in early, rising out of the ground to meet the lowering cloud.

So what do you do? You go on walking.

There’s a landmark distantly to your right. Half-concealed by a fold in the ground stands a broken circle of stone monoliths. You imagine it’s the ruin of some bizarre Stone Age cathedral which was taken out in the war against the Neanderthals. It stands cobalt and unintelligible against the outlines of the over-praised English countryside.