Patrick White - The Vivisector

Hero chose a narrow track through caper vines and renegade artichokes. ‘This is a short way,’ she explained, her back rounding under the effort of the climb.

She couldn’t get there quickly enough, but as her memory had misled her, and the way turned out to be far from short, she was forced to rest from time to time. At such moments his spirit was free to roam the landscape which was becoming his. He made notes, mental ones: then, as he grew more at home in it, marks, and sometimes fairly elaborate drawings, on a pad he had been carrying in his pocket. Occasionally his directions were worded: ‘. . here angels fold their wings — very wooden. . goat-hermits (devils?). . tongues of fire announcing the miracle — or simply a progression of light. .’

Once Hero inquired sulkily: ‘What are you doing, Hurtle?’

‘Putting down one or two things as a reminder.’

Fortunately she was too much occupied with her own thoughts to ask further questions; for in her present state she would not have tolerated varieties of exaltation. So they went their separate ways, whether straying to one side or other of the actual path, or each forging deeper into a private labyrinth.

Burnt by the sun, and glazed by their respective missions, they reached and crossed the ridge.

‘There!’ she breathed, pointing. ‘This is the Convent of the Assumption.’

The buildings, partly hidden by cypresses, olives, and the conventual wall, were of a pale earthen colour, and suggested human rather than ascetic pursuits. He was more impressed by the wandering coastline and beyond it the blaze of sea. On a peak — no, you couldn’t call it that, but the apex of the eastern slope of the island, stood a white chapel, thin as a needle.

‘There is the Church of St John — the house of Theodosios beside it. After the convent we shall visit them.’ She spoke sternly, as though daring him to object. ‘Down there,’ she nodded vaguely in the direction of a sandy inlet, ‘is where the saint landed. They say a spring gushed out, and is still running.’

‘Shan’t we go there as well — to find out whether it is?’

‘Why should we? We have more important things to do.’

He was reminded momentarily of a prim teacher determined to hang on to her half-sceptical beliefs.

While they were approaching the convent a couple of girls in grey frocks, or lay habits, ran out of the gate, and sprang sideways on noticing them.

‘They are some of the orphans these good nuns are taking care of.’ Hero spoke with a sentimental sententiousness; but to him the disappearing girls had the look of sturdy, hairy animals bounding amongst the rocks and thyme.

‘You will love the abbess: she is so sweet,’ Hero whispered à la Olivia Davenport as they stood at the studded gate the girls had slammed shut.

The bell tinkled away, then subsided as they listened to it.

‘Do I look a scarecrow?’ Hero whispered very loud, hoping for praise; her bare lips, revealing no more than the transparent tips of her teeth, were trembling.

He didn’t have to answer, because a small, spry, ageless nun dragged the gate open.

Hero began to speak to her in the tongue peculiar to Greeks and saints, which naturally he couldn’t understand. In the circumstances he was glad Hero was deaf to the language in which he communed with devils.

The small nun smiled, laughed, looking, not at the suppliant, but in complete innocence at the man. She led them along a path edged with round, whitewashed stones and equally rounded basils of a clamorous green. At one point he trod over the edge and the scent shot up and around.

Hero and the nun seemed to have a lot to tell each other.

‘What is she saying?’

‘Nothing. I am telling her that Greek light illuminates. I can breathe Greek air. I am renewed.’

They passed a dormitory where snivelling girls were lying on narrow beds.

Hero hurried him on. ‘She says the abbess has a cold but will be delighted to receive us. Everybody is with cold. There is an epidemic.’

They had been swept into a chaste slit of a room overlooking the luminous sea. There were several upright chairs, signed photographs of royalty and politicians in clothes of another age, three or four indifferent icons, and a day bed covered with an embroidered rug, or blanket. It could only have been the day bed which suggested the seraglio. He had to look out at the sea to remind himself they had been brought there by urgent matters of the spirit.

The abbess appeared with a suddenness and elasticity which made him wonder if she was wearing anything under her habit. She was of medium height, neither young nor old, neither plain nor pretty, but so agile, so supple. He saw her on the day bed rather than the upright chair she chose.

She was chatting away at what seemed a worldly, superficial level, which obviously irritated Hero as her veneer of sentimental piety wore thin. Hero wanted to get down to business with the abbess: to talk about herself, the richly putrid state of her soul, and how her conscience had made her reject her dear Lord and Husband.

Just when she had begun to get a word in, the little portress-nun returned carrying a tin tray with a bottle of ouzo and glasses on it. The nun was so jolly about it all, she mightn’t have known what the bottle contained. She poured out a couple of liberal tots.

Hero angrily refused hers, but the innocent nun appeared as unconscious of anger as she was of the danger in men. He thought he could detect a scent of the basil against which her skirt had brushed.

When the nun had retired, Hero aimed again at the abbess, who sat with her hands folded, her eyelids, lowered, smiling at something, probably not of a spiritual nature, but a concrete object in the world she had left. Hero’s explosive monologue must have been boring her: she looked so much the picture of a lady in a drawing-room; once or twice she seemed to remember her cold, and coughed genteelly behind her hand.

Without the ouzo, he, too might have been bored by the situation. He poured himself another in case the abbess forgot to suggest it: while becoming occupied with a series of slides, which his mind accepted, rejected, improved on, without yet finding the perfect slide, or fusion of near misses. Sometimes it was Hero on the day bed, sometimes the abbess; at times it was Hero in the abbess’s habit, at others the abbess exposing her supple odalisque contours. In each case, hands were plaited behind the head, elbows cocked at the viewer.

It was this which drove him to take out his fountain pen and make a little drawing on the palm of his hand. He was delighted with his discovery of flesh against the unevenly distempered tomato-coloured walls of the parlour, even more with the narrow windowful of luminous sea.

It was probably sight of the fountain pen which caused Hero’s ripened rage to burst. ‘She is impossible, this woman, this abbess: she is so stupid, and so vulgar! Somebody once told me she is the daughter of a Salonica baker. She looks like it, doesn’t she? She herself is made out of unrisen dough! It is from sitting here with the Turks just across the water which makes these women so oriental. I shall not be surprised if lovers come up from the village at night and the nuns are too passive to send them away.’ Her final conjecture made her part her lips in triumph.

He put away his pen. ‘Are you sure she can’t understand you?’

‘Not a word,’ Hero had decided. ‘She is too stupid.’

The abbess had been dreamily looking smiling at his hands during the conversation in which she couldn’t take part.

‘What has she done or said,’ he asked, ‘to annoy you so much?’

‘What? She asks why you have become so silent. When you are here before, you have talked with her. She thinks,’ Hero was becoming raucous, ‘you are my husband. ’