Patrick White - The Solid Mandala

The Chev the Holden the Citroen quite neat the Holden two six seventeen Holdens one Fiat-2500 flash tripe-hounds. The traffic he was certain was sending his temperature up.

Of course, in spite of his intellectual tastes and creative gift, it was the hotels he was craving for. Always had been. He had started long ago writing for the brochures to have them waiting Poste Restante G.P.O. Tore them up after reading and threw them out of the train window before reaching Barranugli. The women would be waiting in the foyers of the posh luxury hotels held down by plush buttons but waiting in their shingled hair their long cigarette-holders gently balanced. Clara Bow — or was it Marilyn Monroe? And Mrs Clare Booth Luce and Mary Macarthy, he wouldn’t overlook the intellectuals. To make conversation with the more established intellectual women. Though women, even Dulcie would suddenly tire him, not so much Mary Macarthy, who was more what you would call a Force. Of course though it was the beds he was really looking forward to, the fine linen, or perhaps sometimes silk with monograms, to feel his long limbs had never aged, and now at last, without Arthur, able to lead a celibate life. Spiritually celibate.

Waldo blushed, and worked his adam’s apple. Down. Over. Something.

One thing, he decided, he would never do. He wouldn’t touch a penny of Arthur’s savings, out of delicacy, because he had willed Arthur dead.

“There,” he said, looking round.

“What?”

“That’s the worst hill done with. So you can stop moaning now.”

“I’m not moaning. I’ve settled down to enjoy a healthful walk.”

So faint normally it could have been a refraction from the memory of Arthur’s carrot hair, the bluish tinge in Arthur’s skin appeared just that much deeper than when they started out, that morning, on a purpose. Abnormally blue.

No, he would not touch a penny of Arthur’s wretched account. He would make it over to that skinny Jew boy Arthur Saporta, with brown flannel patches round his eyes. Whatever Arthur Saporta meant. Beyond the fact that he had his mother Dulcie Feinstein’s eyes.

If Arthur Brown died.

But it finally seemed improbable, on that morning or ever, which meant the alternative. Waldo scuttled at the thought. He was still young enough not to believe in his own death. He kicked the nearest of the blue dogs — Scruffy it was — on deliberate purpose.

“You always hated Scruffy!” Arthur moaned. “Because he was mine.”

Waldo could not feel he owned anything — certainly not Runt his dog — perhaps still his box of manuscripts clippings letters of appreciation — perhaps still Arthur also — if Waldo Brown Terminus Road Sarsaparilla no flowers please ever since the accident he had kept it legibly written out and easy to find if he were inadvertently inadvertently was the word to die.

Paper flowers on the other hand didn’t. So he must make sure of his boxful of papers. Sometimes going through the manuscripts the clippings the letters of appreciation he would feel them still warm with the reason which had brought them into existence. The thoughts. Even if he had not produced what you might call a substantial body of work the fragments and notebooks were still alive with private thought. The minds of others appropriating paring hacking rubbing with a sandpaper of lies impairing invariably ossified what had been tenuously personal. Was he vain to have lost faith in public sculpture? Unlike some. Take Goethe, Goethe must have worn a track through the carpet leaping at his notebooks to perpetuate he thought a Great Thought. The vanity was that men believed their thought remained theirs once turned over to the public. All those goggle-eyed women reverent for their own reverence trailing past a sculpture of poetry and epigrams, and earnest young people fingering IMPROVING ON because it is ordained that great works of art should be exposed, becoming what they were never intended for: done-by-the-public sculpture.

So Waldo raced the traffic up the Barranugli Road.

“Hey, steady on!” Arthur called bumpily. “What are you up to? What’s the point?”

As Waldo raced the traffic towards Sarsaparilla, unfortunately some of it was going in the wrong direction.

But he would arrive, and after they had struggled with that gate, and pushed the grass aside with their chests, because by now in places you might have said they were living under grass, he would go as straight as possible in, and collect the box from on top of the wardrobe, that old David Jones dress box in which Mother had kept the little broken fan and some important blue dress, only in the earlier style, with a pattern of rust where the hooks and eyes had eaten in. The D.J. box was, or had been, the ideal receptacle for papers of a private nature. He had even printed PRIVATE on it, not that it ever helped much. But now he would make it actually his, all those warm thrilled and still thrilling words falling from their creator’s hands into the pit at the bottom of the orchard into ash smouldering brittly palpitating with private thoughts. Because fire is the only privacy the thoughts of great men can expect. Allow them to be turned into sculpture and you are lost.

The wind helped him, and to a certain extent the onward traffic. Arthur was against him of course, as was the opposite stream. But they did arrive at last, on the ramparts of Sarsaparilla, erected laboriously brick by brick, to withstand some hostile thing, by those who had not yet died: the infallible ones with professions and offspring. It was pathetic to think about them. Perhaps like Goethe he was vain, but if small minds could be so obsessed by illusions of permanence, how much less convincing was his own illusion of death?

So Waldo slowed or was slowed down. It is ridiculous, he panted, to think I may pop off, today, or tomorrow, why, I am good for another twenty years, taking reasonable care, keeping off salt, animal fats, potatoes, and white bread.

“What’s up?” Arthur asked. “Don’t tell me you’re running out of energy?”

Because Waldo was standing. Still.

“No,” he said, so slow. “I was looking at that rose.”

He was too, on another level.

“A good specimen of a rose. I like a rose, a white rose,” Arthur said.

It was not its beauty, its whiteness, its perfection, which interested Waldo, it was the solidity of it. Only apparent, however. If he had come closer and alone, he might have torn the rose to show he was that much stronger. Roseflesh on occasions had made him shiver. How much less exposed to destruction was the form of youth, even with time and memory working against it.

Waldo liked that. It made him look rather sly. Now they would go home, and while Arthur was occupied with some bungling business of his own, he would take down the private box, he would take out the current notebook. Always taking, taking renews, give too much and the recipient expects all . He liked that, he would write it down. For his PRIVATE pleasure. And the bit about form of youth, time and memory . In that way he would continue living. In the notebooks. In his secret mind. In spite of Arthur. And Goethe.

Youth is the only permanent state of mind. There was no stage in his life when he hadn’t felt young — he insisted — except sometimes as a little boy. If growing old is to become increasingly aware, as a little boy his premature awareness irritated his elders to the point of slapping. So there are, in fact, no compartments, unless in the world of vegetables.

Today I am thirty, he had calculated, looking at himself in the glass of the deal dressing-table he shared with Arthur, his brushes and bottles to the right, Arthur’s to the left, as he insisted. His face trembled down one side as he tried to accept the incredible. Sometimes he wondered whether anybody realised there was still the little boy inside him, beside his other self, looking out. His eyes, like his mother’s, were blue, though his were watered down. It always gave him some satisfaction to acknowledge blue eyes in the street, especially those of women. He made them conspirators. Or members of a select club. Though naturally he would never have informed them. (Brown eyes he blackballed automatically. Ugh!)