Patrick White - The Vivisector

It was Hero who might have drunk the ouzo. She was drunk, but with her disillusion and helplessness. He tried to support her. Hadn’t she been his mistress, more than that, his creative source? He would have liked to point out the scaly sea, like a huge, live fish, rejoicing in its evening play, but he might have mumbled like the vanished saint. Perhaps if he could have done a drawing; but Hero only understood the visions of her own inferno.

They slithered hobbled down over rocks scratched by thorns whipped by avenging trees down past the convent everywhere silence except for dew dripping through dust on to dust down into the village which might have died in their absence if a dynamo hadn’t given it a pulse a lit doorway bursting into laughter a tree swelling and ejaculating.

They slept in their separate cells; or he lay on his iron bed, under a damp-smelling sheet, his eyelids flickering then rigidly open beneath what had been the ceiling: he could visualize Hero doing the same.

Next morning, while they were sitting below, over little cups of muddy coffee at a marble table, Hero asked: ‘When we will return to Athens, Hurtle, what are your plans? Will you continue your tour into Europe?’ She sneezed once or twice, because by now the convent cold had broken out in her too.

He should have felt ashamed chewing so ravenously at the crust of bread; but the bread was good; and the act allowed him time to appreciate his release. Fortunately Hero’s expectations weren’t excessive: round the café table there was an air of camping out. She looked listless, bloodshot, nicotine-stained. While she scratched her parting with unvarnished nails, he could afford to swallow down the last knot of half-masticated bread with complete naturalness. The last of the yellow crumbs fell from his lips and scattered down his chest. He knew he hadn’t bothered to wash the sleep out of his eyes: altogether, he must have looked this woman’s awful counterpart.

‘No,’ he said, shaking his head, half-choking on the swallowed bread. ‘I shall go back to Flint Street.’

‘So soon?’ She yawned. ‘It is not practical to come such a distance and waste the fare.’

He might have told her that, in his case, the only life he could recognize as practical was the one lived inside his skull, and though he could carry this with him throughout what is called the world, it already contained seeds created by a process of self-fertilization which germinated more freely in their natural conditions of flaking plaster, rust deposits, balding plush, and pockets of dust enriched with cobweb. If he didn’t try to tell her any of this it was partly because she wouldn’t have been interested, and because of certain apocalyptic moments on their journey to the other side of the island; though these too, might have been experienced in time amongst the broken glass and tarnished light, the empty chrysalides and dark, indestructible plants of the conservatory at Flint Street.

Hero had drunk her medicinal coffee down to the dregs. ‘I do not understand the mind of an artist. He is too egoist — too enclosed, ’ she said without any apparent resentment. ‘I am glad I am, in the end, dependent on nobody or nothing but myself.’

Because her final statement didn’t bear looking at, she avoided his eyes, his hand which continued to offer the conventional gestures of affection. After all, hadn’t they been flung together in the more humiliating figures of the trampoline? They had learnt the secrets of each other’s underclothes.

Hero pushed back her coffee cup, and raised her voice in self-defence. ‘Dependent not even on God. Not even on my husband. If I tell you I intend to remain in Athens, you will immediately think: “Ah, she is crawling back to Cosma!” I know he will take me if I wish. I have it in writing.’ She made a move towards her bag, but changed her mind. ‘I do not wish it. Nobody is responsible for me: least of all those I love — or worship.’

Forgetting she had finished it, she took a mouthful of her coffee, and now had to spit out the muddy dregs; however he remembered Hero, and there was still the return voyage to Piraeus, this might remain the key version: the black lips spluttering and gasping; the terrible tunnel of her black mouth.

‘ Dreck! Dreck! The Germans express it best. Well, I will learn to live with such Dreck as I am: to find a reason and purpose in this Dreck. ’

All this time a little golden hen had been stalking and clucking round the iron base of the café table, pecking at the crumbs which had fallen from their mouths. The warm scallops of her golden feathers were of that same inspiration as the scales of the great silver-blue sea creature they — or he, at least — had watched from John of the Apocalypse, ritually coiling and uncoiling, before dissolving in the last light.

‘See — Hero?’ he began to croak, while pointing with his ineffectual finger. ‘This hen!’ he croaked.

Hero half-directed her attention at the hen; but what he could visualize and apprehend, he could really only convey in paint, and then not for Hero. The distressing part was: they were barking up the same tree.

Their lack of empathy was not put to more severe tests because the proprietor came to the table. As he wiped the marble surface, he made some confidential remark in the language the ex-lover found he still resented.

‘Alitheia?’ Hero replied, craning.

‘He says,’ she explained, ‘the vaporaki has been sighted from the mole. Oh dear, I detest these departures, particularly from islands: there is little hope of recovering what one has left behind.’

The iron claws of the marble table vibrated on the ground as they pushed back their wobbly chairs.

‘Have you got the tickets?’ Hero gasped. ‘The keys — I must make sure — the keys!’

The golden hen flashed her wings: not in flight; she remained consecrated to this earth even while scurrying through illuminated dust.

At the smallgoods where he always bought his milk, the girl said: ‘Thought you’d knocked off the milk. Thought you’d gone on a diet, or something.’

‘I could have gone away, too. Or died.’

The girl didn’t understand it was meant to be a joke. She looked pleasantly serious, with her fresh face and moustache of perspiration beads. It was going to be a hot day.

‘No,’ he said, guiltily on account of his attempted joke. ‘There are times when I just don’t bother.’

‘You could have it delivered. Why don’t you have it delivered?’

The healthy humourless girl obviously had his interests at heart: she looked at him so earnestly.

‘I don’t want to. There are days on end when I don’t want to think about, I don’t want to be bothered with the stuff.’

The girl found it difficult to believe. ‘But an elderly gentleman like you ought to take care of himself.’

He laughed a rather metallic laugh, and looked to see whether there was a glass handy.

‘I’m fifty-five.’

‘That’s about what I’d have reckoned.’

He felt almost bound to take his revenge by seducing the smallgoods girl, only she might have been the kind who is hiding a crush on her grandfather.

‘And you can’t tell me you’re not a gentleman,’ she said in triumph, ‘because I know one when I see one.’

He knocked over the empty milk bottle he was returning, and the girl, realizing she was paid to conduct a business, began concentrating on the till.

‘After living the fifty-five years you so correctly dropped to,’ he told her, ‘I’ve reached the conclusion the only truth is what one overhears.’

The girl registered the sale. ‘Eh?’ She laughed, and the perspiration shot off her and landed on the clanging till. ‘You’ve got something there! I bet we’d hear a lot of dirty cracks!’