Patrick White - The Vivisector

‘But didn’t you tell her I’m your lover, and that you want your conscience tidied up?’

Hero ignored him.

He felt so lazy after the ouzo, and the abbess was smiling more than ever in her dumb language.

Fortunately the door opened and the jolly little portress reappeared dragging behind her two of the orphans. From the arms of the hulking girls dangled embroidered mats and runners and fringed book-marks.

The abbess smiled and murmured.

‘These are the girls’ works,’ Hero interpreted unwillingly, ‘which will help her maintain her orphanage.’

He chose several pieces of the embroidery, though it didn’t really interest him. On feeling in his pockets he found his wallet wasn’t there; he must have left it behind at the inn.

Hero paid, somewhat contemptuously: while the abbess extended her upper lip without having drunk any of the ouzo, still dreamily murmuring, staring at the full note-case.

Hero said: ‘All these girls are whores. They have all had bastards, or are in process of having them.’

The girls sniggered and blushed over what they couldn’t understand. Embroidered on their glowing skins, pimples shone with a virulence of chicken-pox.

It was time for the visitors to leave, whether their mission was completed or not. As they passed alongside the dormitory windows, the girls lay snivelling and sniggering on their beds, one of them too obviously hugging a bellyful of sin under her blanket.

The abbess turned to the sympathetic husband, and said in English of a kind: ‘Girls seeck, seeck. Grippe. ’ She mimed it by clutching her small animated breasts.

‘You see? She understands.’

‘Hardly a word.’ Hero laughed; she had modified her opinion, though.

Strands of purple were by now visible in the sea or sky along the coast. A conventional piety had reappeared in Hero’s face: she was possibly hoping for a blessing on taking leave of the condemned abbess. He felt drunk and sick from the ouzo, but exalted by the light and colour of the sea-sky.

Soon after they had left the two nuns (perhaps there weren’t any more) and two attendant orphan-whores, at the convent gate, Hero turned on him as though he were to blame. ‘You see? Why did we expect more? Even Cosmas was sceptical of this woman.’

She walked down the track, her head grown disproportionate. A phalanx of goats, or orphans, dashed out and away from a tangle of evergreens.

‘It was I who was foolish enough to believe in the possibility of regeneration.’ Even so, it was her lover and her absent husband she accused.

‘Can God be sceptical of us?’ he suggested.

‘I am beginning to think so,’ She sighed at the purple evening. ‘But wait,’ she suddenly remembered and took heart, ‘wait till we talk with this hermit — Theodosios. This is a saint who will plead for us.’ In her conviction, and the blaze of hieratic gold, she turned her face towards him, her sins as good as forgiven.

His unregenerate soul could feel no more than sympathetic towards her state of mind, while worshipping the aesthetic variations of its incarnation. It was the same with the landscape. He was conscious of God as a formal necessity on which depended every figure in the afternoon’s iconography: goat-troglodytes; the old man pissing against the wind; orphan-whores; the procession of mourners; a martyred Hero. The ouzo in him, which should have helped dissolve, made him cling, on the contrary, to outward and visible signs. There were moments when his fingers were forced actually to cling: to jags of marble, or lichen-spotted olive branch, to steady himself on the ascent.

‘If we’re mad enough to climb up to this chapel,’ he reasoned aloud, ‘probably the most you can expect is half an hour’s rambling conversation with a crazy monk, and we’ll break our legs coming down in the dark. Who’ll carry us, I’d like to know?’

‘God will,’ she answered from ahead.

It didn’t sound incongruous in the world of light through which they were climbing.

Actually Hero was in pretty bad physical condition. As they mounted the last earthwork separating them from this soaring arrow of a white chapel, she was breathing like a broken-winded horse. The heel was coming off one of her shoes.

‘Even the clothes we wear are degenerate,’ she gasped and ranted. ‘If I had been truly sincere — single-minded — I would have walked here on my bare feet.’

For a moment he was afraid she might be preparing to throw away the offending shoes.

So he returned to the subject of her recent disgust. ‘Is the abbess in touch with Theodosios?’

‘This abbess! Why should such a holy man interrupt his spiritual life for the babble of a silly, worldly woman?’

‘In sickness, for instance: she could send him food and help. Didn’t you at least inquire after him?’

‘I will not be bullied, Hurtle—’ she stumbled—‘with what I have failed to do. In any case, how could I get a word in with this woman? She is all the time complaining about the price of oil — the tear and wear of girls’ drawers. She is hinting at me that I should maintain her convent. Like all greedy people, she thinks she is the only one who has a right to be the blood-sucker.’

At this point, if she had been wearing her fur coat, Hero would have settled deeper in it; but she wasn’t: and they had reached the narrow plateau in front of the chapel.

‘I myself no longer know which way to approach. I am afraid,’ she said, jittering after his hand.

He led her, or was led, round the side of the chapel, to a white-washed cube probably the hermit’s cell. They trod regardless through one or two rows of sprawling, droughty tomatoes and artichokes run to seed. Hero began calling reverently in Greek. On entering the silence, they found nothing except an iron pot upside-down on the uneven dirt floor.

‘Of course, at this hour,’ she became all tremulous smiles, ‘he will be at his prayers. I do not want to interrupt. But time is so precious.’

They led each other back, trampling through the artichokes and tomatoes. They were caught between the purple east, which would never open to them, and the burning west, the blaze of which they mightn’t be strong enough to endure.

Hero was calling tinnily in imitation of the convent bell. Blundering up the chapel steps he could sense they were wasting their time: there was a smell of cold candle droppings, and rotten woodwork, and general mustiness. All but one of the icons had been prised away from the crude iconostasis, and the eyes of the survivor gouged out: by Turks from across the channel? or the devils of Perialos? The sound of birds’ wings might have soothed; light might have furnished the abandoned chapel with a panopoly against corruption, if one remorseless spear hadn’t struck at a subsiding mound of human excrement beside the altar.

Hero was raging: her tongue looked like an ugly instrument in blunt rubber. ‘Are we lost? Do we come all this way for— nothing? Yes, of course we do; it is not so very extraordinary. Cosmas would have warned you: this hermit — who is dead, or gone — was a filthy old man — covered with oil-spots, and candle-wax. He wore his hair in a pigtail because he was too lazy to screw it into place, in its bun. He smelled sour — of urine, and cold beans. Cosmas said he had lice: he had seen them moving around, he said, on the croûte at the nape of his neck; but I would not accept that, much as I respect my husband.’

‘If you knew all this, what was the point in coming back?’

‘For the words he spoke — which I have never been able to remember — not their meaning — I hear only the sound of them.’

They were feeling their way back with their feet down the outside steps of the chapel; when she began to blubber hopelessly. ‘I think we have lost our faith in God because we cannot respect men. They are so disgusting. And cannot address one another — except mumbling.’