Patrick White - The Vivisector

Suddenly he had begun to live the life for which he had been preparing, or for which he might even have been prepared. At the end of the years of watching, of blundering around inside an inept body, of thinking, or rather, endlessly changing coloured slides in his magic-lantern of a mind, the body had become an instrument, the crude, blurred slides were focusing into what might be called a vision. Most of the day he now spent steadily painting, still destroying, but sometimes amazed by a detail which mightn’t have been his, yet didn’t seem to be anybody else’s. There were one or two canvases he had dared keep, in which dreams and facts had locked in an architecture which did not appear alterable. When his fingers weren’t behaving as the instruments of his power, they returned to being the trembling reeds he had grown up with. If he had not been dependent on Nance Lightfoot for ‘any little luxuries’ he might have taken to drink or smoke, and trembled more violently than he did. His nightly journeys through the deserted store, through the smells of virgin drapery, floor-wax, ammonia, and his own sweat, exhausted and prepared him for the next ordeal.

Because next morning remained an ordeal: he was so flabby, frightened that his only convincing self might not take over from him at the easel.

Nance sometimes left him alone for days, either from diffidence, or a kind of tact. He thought she was afraid of the paintings on the whole.

When she was most afraid she became her most brutish: she would begin to strut. ‘Once I promised to take off me clothes, and let yer paint me in the naked. Well,’ she said, kicking at something he had just finished, ‘I muster been pinko at the time. I’d probably come out wearun a prick and balls for luck.’ She laughed right back to the uvula: probably pinko now too.

Sometimes he chucked her out, but often his own animal responded to hers, and they would fall down clawing at each other, curving and writhing in uncontrolled but logical convulsions; till only the grit on the carpet was left.

On one occasion she sent a note soon after she had left:

Dear love Hurtle,

I am no good to you I know, dragging you into the gutter where you don’t belong. I won’t love you any less if you tell me it is over and I must get, but know that without you inside of me I am not whole, I am not

Your

NANCY LIGHTFOOT

He couldn’t have told her, because he needed her: not the humiliating fivers, not her ‘love’, necessarily; but because on one level he was resuscitated by the breath he breathed, the saliva he drank, out of her mouth, and because on the purer plane, they solved together equations which might have defeated his tentative mind, and which probably never entered Nance’s consciousness.

Poor Nance, there were other material developments he would have to explain. As an introduction, he bought her a little ring, of two gilt serpents intertwined. He found it in a junk shop on Church Hill; apart from the prettiness of the conceit it was of little value.

‘What is it?’ she asked dubiously. ‘Is it gold?’

‘Eh? Looks pretty tinny to me. But it must have cost money, antique jewellery like that.’

They had sat down on the grass in the Domain and her face was darkened, with shade from the fig leaves.

‘Why did you spend all that dough on me? Eh? Even if it was me own.’

The way she drew down her mouth, loaded at one corner with a cigarette, she appeared to be trying to make herself look particularly coarse.

‘Or wasn’t it my money, cock? Where else did yer strike oil?’

He might have felt insulted if he hadn’t been holding the knife to Nance. ‘I made some,’ he said. ‘I sold a couple of paintings.’

‘Oh, you did, did yer?’ She had almost eaten off her lipstick. ‘Who in hell would buy a couple of your bloody paintuns?’

He must be very patiently gentle with Nance. ‘A woman,’ he said.

‘What sort of woman?’ she hawked, spitting out a shred of tobacco. ‘A lady?’

‘I don’t know. I was told a woman.’

‘What sort of woman or lady would buy one of those nutty paintuns?’ Then she considered: ‘How d’you mean you was “told”?’

‘By the dealer.’

‘What — does anybody deal in rat shit?’

She was panting by now, unsticking the hair above her forehead, freeing the grass- and fig-stained frock her haunches had pinned too tightly to the ground.

‘Which of the pictures did the person buy?’ Her ears were pricked.

‘The one I call “Electric City”.’

‘Oh, that!’ She sniggered, and tossed away her cigarette. ‘What else, Hurt?’

‘I don’t think you saw it. One called—’ he hesitated because he was about to expose himself—‘ “Marriage of Light”.’

They sat staring out from under the Moreton Bay fig at the dazzlingly iridescent water.

Nance was holding her head at an angle which made her neck look brittle. ‘That was my painting,’ she said, or gasped.

‘You never looked at it.’ He could have flattened her. ‘Or once, I think, you kicked at it.’

‘I saw it,’ she insisted. ‘I know I’m supposed to be too big a dope to see. I’m only good for stretchun out on the kapok. But I seen you, didn’t I? In the fuckun dark!’

She took a handkerchief out of her bag and rubbed her mouth very vigorously; then she spat; and sat with her hands palm-upward in her lap.

He lay chewing grass, hoping the blood wouldn’t burst out of his veins, the breath explode in his chest: it would be terrible, if Nance enjoyed glimmers of sensibility.

‘I liked it,’ she said in a dead, even voice, ‘it had sort of sparks in it. It was my paintun.’ Suddenly she was shielding the last rags of her aggressiveness. ‘I practically painted it with me own bloody tail—’ her voice rising before dropping.

Seated beneath the giant fig, she was the first original work of sculpture seen in a Sydney park.

Around them was a sound of what could have been pure silence, out of which she dredged up her voice to ask: ‘What did they fetch?’

‘One of them twenty-five. The other thirty: it was a bigger painting.’

‘Good Christ, you’re not much of an investment! Or else somebody’s a shyster.’

He couldn’t answer her.

‘But whichever it is, I gotter have my whack. That was in the agreement.’

‘Not yet, you can’t, Nance. I’m buying a piece of land.’ He swallowed a gusher of green spittle before rejecting the empty grass. ‘Up the line,’ he added desperately.

He couldn’t explain that the suburban bush, probably Africa to her, was in a sense of Mumbelong.

‘And wotcher gunner do—“up the line”? Paint? ’

‘Yes, Nance. Paint.’

‘And live by the ladies that take yer down?’

He couldn’t answer that either.

‘Or Poncess Nance!’

Her coil of hair was halfway down; her eyelids might have been walnut shells.

‘Am I ever gunner see yer?’ she asked.

‘Whenever you feel like it.’

So it was settled beneath the spreading fig, on the uncomfortable fruit, some of it still sticky, some already petrified. From big blubbering orphaned baby who needed comforting, Nance became the insatiable goddess, who only didn’t think of tearing bits off her victim and throwing them into the blue waters of the cove.

It was a wonder they were able to recover their identities merely by his stuffing in a shirt, and her harnessing a torrent of hair; but they did: they bared their teeth at each other, lowered their eyes once, and resumed their actual lives.

Caldicott advanced him money against three more paintings; so it was possible to buy the strip of scrub on which, he had begun to feel, his creative life depended. The dealer, a mild creature of indeterminate age and sex, ran a little gallery at the top of some stairs not far from where Duffield lived. The gallery itself was almost always empty, except on occasions when ladies in twos and threes tried out their taste on the several paintings exposed for that purpose. The muted ladies appeared almost paralysed by their own daring.