Patrick White - The Vivisector

The early heat made him feel he wasn’t up to more, so he took his bottle of milk and went.

All through the streets there was already a hard, yellow glare. Old men, older than himself, were putting out garbage bins, rank with fat-trimmings, cabbage-spines and prawnshells. The singlets the old men were wearing exposed their veined arms, dark as stringy bark from the elbows down, skinny-white about the biceps. Women of all ages were going sleeveless on such a morning: their skins had the soapy, large-pored look; their hair was set too tight, either with brilliantine, or perspiration. What had started as an adventure, to move around freely inside your dress, almost nothing else on, was becoming a martyrdom as the blazing yellow lid was screwed tighter, and the women dragged from one station to the next.

In spite of what he saw around him, he felt at large. His clothes were still easy on him. His bare feet followed paths of unconsumed shade, enjoying the texture of the pavement. They were elegant for naked feet: long, fine-boned, unscathed by a lifetime of shoes. He found himself looking at them with such pleasure they should have been someone else’s; he might have grown cynical of his own complacence if he hadn’t caught sight of his hand.

Swinging a milk bottle by the neck in the green light from the pollarded planes, it became noticeable. His hands were beginning to give him away. They had started shrivelling, certainly only slightly, and only with a freckle or two, but which might become cancerous.

The freckled, in some cases, scabby, hands of the old men putting out garbage, trembled from their exertions. They immediately fumbled after tobacco: the cigarette paper, stuck to the lip, or held between papery fingers, stirred tinkling in the vestige of a breeze.

His disgust made him walk faster, no longer choosing the shady paths, stalking with white hatred across the burning asphalt. He had never been so relieved to reach 17 Flint Street. He bundled in, most inelegant, past the iron gate which dragged, under the araucaria: an elderly gentleman of fifty-five.

And how dead the house since he had gone out unsuspecting for milk: the interior smelled of age and dirt, no longer of cool, but of a sour, creeping damp. Worst of all, he had grown hostile to all these paintings since the chopper, in the innocent hands of the smallgoods girl, had descended on his own innocence. The paintings, the earlier ones you end by accepting like inherited moral traits, had withdrawn apathetically into the walls on which they were hanging. They were less humiliating, however, than the bravura of technique, the unsolved problems of space, the passages of turgid paint, which glared at him from the later ones standing around the skirting-boards. Most disturbing of all was the painting on the easel in his top-back studio-bedroom. Before his going out it had struck him as having a lucidity, an almost perfect simplicity: the essence of table and chair-ness of chair, which he had been trying to convey in the previous versions of his ‘Furniture’, all lost with his going out; the smallgoods girl, by performing a simple operation on his mind, had done away with the membrane separating truth from illusion.

In this throbbingly illusionless state, he realized the bottle of milk was growing hot in his tenacious hands. He left the appalling window which opened out of the easel on to his interior emptiness. He went downstairs so quickly the house shook; his bones were jarred. On arriving in the kitchen he found he must have left the milk in the bedroom, but would have had no taste for milky coffee; he drank a mouthful of cold black, pouring the rest of the poisonous stuff down the sink.

It was the heat. He was constipated, too: when a smooth velvety stool might have been the great rectifier; much more depended on the bowels than the intellect was prepared to admit.

Inside the vine-hooded dunny with its back to Chubb’s Lane, heat became a positive virtue, an assistance to the stiff pelvis. While he sat straining in the heat which was half smell, he noticed the aphorism he had started to scribble on the white-wash — must have been twenty-five years ago — and never finished:

God the Vivisector

God the Artist

God

Permanently costive, he never would find the answer: it was anyway pointless, not to say childish.

As the sounds of life flowed along the lane behind him, breaking, and rejoining, his only desire was to mingle with them. He did, for an instant or two, and was rewarded with a gentle content, behind closed eyelids, in his secret shrine: till the woman’s voice began.

‘See in there, Ida? That’s where the artist lives — Wotchermecallum— Duffield. ’

‘Go on! The one that makes all the money?’

‘That’s what they say. Never seen a sign of it meself. Look, Ida! Look at this fence!’

He was wide-eyed for what they were going to see.

‘Ooh, dear! Don’t, Jean! Don’t!’ Ida was giggly. ‘You’ll have the rotten old thing come down.’

‘Don’t worry. The vines ’ull always hold it up. Look at the bloody cracks in the walls. Look at the down -pipes! No on ’ud think Mr Duffield was ’is own landlord.’

‘Arr, dear!’ Ida giggled.

‘They say there’s cockroaches flying around inside as big as bloody rats.’

‘Oh, peugh!’ Ida shrieked. ‘I don’t believe yer, Jean. You’re layun it on!’ Then she said with conventional reverence: ‘Must be old, isn’t ’e?’

‘Yes, ’e’s old all right — and crazy as a cut snake. That’s what art does for yer.’

He was so fascinated by what he was overhearing it scarcely referred to himself.

‘’E’s old,’ continued Jean, and seemed to be spitting something out. ‘But not so old, mind you. I was walkun down Flint Street the other mornun — that’s the front side of the residence, see? and old Duffield come runnun down the steps laughun and talkun at everyone and nothun.’

‘Might ’uv been for you, Jean.’

‘Nah. Duffield’s a nut. But this is the point, madam. ’Is bloody flies was all open. Greasy old flies!’

‘Ooh, dear! What did I tell yer? Might ’uv dragged yer in! Might ’uv raped yer!’

‘It ’ud take a better man than nutty old Duffield. I didn’t tell my hubby, though.’

‘Don’t blame yer. I was never raped — except nearly — once.’

‘They say it’s the most terrible thing can happen to a woman. Takes away ’er self-respect.’

‘Yairs.’

They were moving off.

‘Look, Ida, I lay in bed all night wonderun what I could do for ’im. Take ’im a knuckle of veal perhaps. I didn’t, though. Poor bugger, what does ’e get up to? All alone. In there. ’E’s gunner die. Amongst the cockroaches and oil-paintuns. And nobody know.’

‘Nothun ter do with you, Jean. We’ve got our own.’

As soon as he was alone he pulled his pants up. Thanks to his constipation, he wasn’t delayed by wiping: one advantage in being an octogenarian nut.

He went upstairs and dressed a little: that is, he put on a pair of elderly sandshoes. He came down, and pulled the door shut on Number Seventeen. The impact might have started him off feeling younger if he hadn’t noticed the veins in the back of his hand.

But it was in some compelled sense a festive occasion: the articulated trams his still athletic body mounted; green prawns and pink in the Quay windows; the ferry sidling under him. Already the jaundiced torpor of the morning was dissolved in blue water. The light cut like diamonds. A breeze was flirting inside his shirt.

He sat down on one of the benches towards the ferry’s bows. He was prepared for any kind of encounter: what he got was a man, probably as old as himself.

The man remarked that it was hot, but they would cool off when they sailed. The companion he had chosen for the voyage grunted and withdrew inside himself, erecting awnings over his eyes against what he might be about to endure. At the same time he was impatient for it: the hand supporting the long face was trembling; the sinews of the arm were tense all the way down to the blanched point of the elbow.