Patrick White - The Vivisector

He had never been altogether dishonest: nor yet entirely honest; because that isn’t possible. Even saints kid themselves a bit. God or whatever couldn’t have been entirely honest in creating the world.

While working, he had to recognize the almost voluptuous love with which he carved his own cheek out of the paint, down to the board: his not convincingly ascetic cheek. The nick to the corner of his not quite honest but human — he hoped — watchful left eye produced the authentic shudder of love. Even the practice of mere skill, those weightless wet dreams of art, rejoiced his mind and refreshed his body.

From withdrawing into his private world he was forgetting about his body. He had seen it as cruder. He had encouraged it to coarsen, to resist values he might still find himself longing for. Maman had done a better job than either of them realized in forcing his head in amongst the scents of the wardrobe. Then the stoppered, clotted, fin de siècle scent bottle on Nance’s dressing-table. He hadn’t screwed the Maman in Nance, but might just once, for the experience.

He took a rest after that, or rather, his no longer clottish body roamed around the scrub. He stopped to stroke leaves he didn’t see, but apprehended. His mind was floating in pure contentment the crushed-out scents the pricking silence of heat and scrub.

Presently he felt the need to go back: to find out how much of the truth reflected by the mirror had united with how much his mind might have confessed. He was at once wearily dejected and daringly fleetingly pleased. He went so far as to smile at his alter ego of the board: when his conscience in the mirror caught him at it. At least teeth were a permissible vanity in any man — but his didn’t appear in the portrait, only in the glass.

So he frowned back at the flat, glum, half-truthful reflection of himself, and began to slog drudgingly. Half of life was drudgery, he had discovered, and by now had begun to suspect ninety per cent of painting was uncreative, at most a laying on of paint, building up to destroy.

So he gouged out his turgid features, reassembled his failed colours, wiped off the smears: it was a long way from razor-play.

Once during the afternoon, at its most monotonous, against the buzz of blow-flies and the stench from a lump of corned brisket, he made a mark that became a positive signpost: his no longer adolescent figure could still have been leaning in desperate ennui beside a window which prevented his closer approach to the outer world. He caught the curve of the body with one slash of the razor, and wasn’t ashamed at confessing to survived elegance.

Of course he really loved it. He loved the elegance. He loved himself. Himself gathered into the corn-coloured folds of Maman’s dress. However much of a coarse, thickset, moral scavenger the present showed, a lyrical onanist of the past hadn’t been altogether suppressed. Here he had caught the two of them in flagrant delight, in his own unlikely body, in paint.

He threw down his brush after that. He could have shouted, but it would have been for what he knew might look otherwise in the morning; so he walked away through his rickety, amateurish barrack of a house. It would begin to darken. Soon there would be nothing left but the prospect of a next day.

During those weeks he went several times to the city, for no reason he could have given. If he had wanted to escape from the portrait he couldn’t have done so: he carried its photograph in his head. At the height of his passion for it, he would look around him at the faces in the street, and some of them, misinterpreting his expression, would frown a warning. If he had lived up a flight of stairs round the corner, he might have found a pretext to accost a stranger, for no more perverse reason than to force an anonymous, preferably innocent face into a relationship with the unfinished portrait. Whether the unknown responded with rapture or disgust, would have been immaterial: proof that he existed for others was what he guiltily hankered after.

He would go along finally to Nance. On the first occasion she pulled the door open a crack, and asked in a rusty sounding voice: ‘Wadderyerwant there?’ though she must have known by now what everybody wanted.

When she saw him, she dragged the door wider open. ‘Arr — come on in, then — if it’s you.’ Even so, she begrudged him the welcome; she was looking fat and overpowdered; she narrowed her eyes at something that might be in store for her.

How to convey to Nance what she wouldn’t have believed? He could only flounder in her: she might have been a field of heavy-pollened, white daisies.

‘What’s got inter yer?’ she said at last. ‘Am I someone else?’

If she suspected it, she didn’t sound put out, nor did she expect explanations, preferring to supply her own.

‘All you men are in love with yourselves. That’s what it amounts to. When a man feels real good about ’imself, he has to have a woman, and it’s called love. At least the poofs are honest. They look around for another poof.’ What she visualized gave her the giggles. ‘To be on the right track, you oughter be, all of you, one big set of poofs!’

She was so equable she might have been persuaded to collaborate, if the air of afternoon detachment hadn’t been snatched away from her soon after: she developed that expression of swim or sink, it didn’t matter, as they were swept together into the blowhole, themselves boiling and lashing. Her isolated gull’s cry died away under the grinding of the iron trams.

On the stairs as he went down there was a sailor on his way up. What the sailor and the whore might do together couldn’t make Duffield jealous: his own collusion with the woman who passed for Nance Lightfoot was too complete.

On the next occasion, however, there she was, dressed to go out: formal after her fashion.

She yanked the door wider open. ‘This is a funny time to come!’ It was more or less the same time as before. ‘I gotter go out,’ she threatened. ‘An appointment. If you’d like ter know, it’s a bloke who’s on ’is last leg.’

Although she had painted her lips into a big patent-leather rosette, they were thin and straight under the grease.

‘If you gotter,’ she said, ‘you gotter be quick.’

She didn’t expect conversation, but began dragging off her clothes, those over her head with such determination some of her hair remained standing on end after it had been pulled through.

His belt-buckle nicked at something passive, wall or flesh, as he whipped it through the loops of his pants. The formal room was all sounds. His body had never sounded so lean as when the superfluous clothes slithered and coiled.

As for Nance, lying straight, almost rigid, she looked positively thin: he thought he could see her exasperated ribs milky-blue under the skin.

That afternoon they made the geometry of love, its sparest bones.

‘I’m gunner be late,’ she accused, as she got up and forced herself back into her clothes, ‘when I guaranteed to be on the dot.’ She was professionally committed: in spite of her haste and distraction, she found time to repair the damaged parts of her face.

Nor could he resent her obligations on this second occasion, for he was beginning to feel his way to the end of a labyrinth in which he had been lost several days. The suburban train couldn’t carry him fast enough, his unemployed hands locked between his thighs. All along the street becoming country road, along the track he followed through the scrub, he leaned into the wind, to arrive quicker, to walk inside his no more than necessary shack.

There his Doppelgänger was leering at him out of a distorting mirror. He took a brush and extenuated the rather too desirable mouth into a straight line. He was right. The eyes agreed. The shoulders sank into place. For the rest of daylight he hung about, dabbing and wiping, tidying his paint, unexpectedly meticulous in attending to unimportant details. He realized his physical mouth was hanging open, his breath snoring in a solid stream from between his lips, as though he had just woken from a demanding sleep.