Patrick White - The Vivisector

‘It’s our painting all right.’ She had driven him up against the board he couldn’t bring himself to turn. ‘Whether it’s one you’d approve of, I can’t tell without your looking at it.’

He realized his heart was beating as it used to sometimes while he found the courage to speak the truth in front of Maman. His repeated downfall was his longing to share truth with somebody specific who didn’t want to receive it. Was it why he had failed so far in love?

‘Go on!’ Hero Pavloussi was by now positively shouting. ‘I know by your expression it is something horrible and degrading. I don’t want to see it, but show!’

At the same time her fingers began struggling with his in her determination to turn the board and share in his depravity.

He was probably grimacing back as desperately as she, when the board fell flat on its back: the dust shot up out of the bare boards.

Hero Pavloussi began to cry and cough. ‘You see? It is worse! It is a pornography! Are you trying to kill me?’

If, as the tone of her accusation suggested, she meant him to join her in rejecting his painting, it was not because he was persecuting her, but because — he could see more clearly now that he was looking at the painting again — this showed an act of self-destruction: the figure of the woman was deliberately aiming the blow at her own heart.

‘Ohhhh!’ she was moaning like a whole Greek chorus in the airless junk-room.

‘Don’t you at least find it formally acceptable?’ he was stuttering like a breathless youth out of the few phrases he had learnt.

She had hidden her face in her hands and was perhaps still looking from between her fingers.

‘Tonally, then,’ the youth in him shouted; or was it: ‘Totally!’ while in a cold flash, he stood at the end of his life listening to rats scampering through an otherwise deserted house.

Then he realized Hero Pavloussi was running down the actual stairs, faster, faster, hurtling, practically throwing herself, it sounded, from the last flight. Her footsteps on the pavement were less tragic, in fact a dwindling stampede, in which she went over on a heel, once, almost throwing, then righting herself. It was this pathetic rather than tragic sound, of some swollen-footed, human beast of burden hurrying with bursting carrier-bags to catch the tram, which almost made him love the ‘pure soul’ manquée of Hero Pavloussi.

That he couldn’t love her entirely, or call out through the window, or run after her offering the small change of the flirtatious male, was due to the fact that he was left with his painting in the darkening cubby-hole of a room, and in the painting they each existed on another level, neither pathetic nor tragic, neither moral nor, as she continued erupting in his eardrums, ‘pornographic’. They were, rather, an expression of truth, on that borderline where the hideous and depraved can become aesthetically acceptable. So, in the hot little, dusk-bound room, the man’s phallus glowed and spilled, while the woman, her eyes closed, her mouth screaming silent words, fluctuated between her peacock-coloured desires and the longed-for death-blow.

He felt too weak for more. He went into the front bedroom, already cooler and darker for the encroaching araucaria. Lying beneath its fringed pagoda, on the unmade bed, he saw how he might illuminate the woman’s face still further. But in the morning. For the moment he could only lie and add up the sum of his working life, the details of which remained with him indelibly, unlike his age: he could never remember that; your age is something forced on you by other people.

He must have been sleeping. His consciousness throbbed back into him too suddenly and too hot like the final episode of a second-class film ending in a flash of transparency: he heard the clatter. Night had fallen in the meantime, but by no means opaque. His dry tongue, flickering, tasted a lemonade of light filtered through the araucaria.

He was frightened: no, not frightened; nothing is frightening this side of exhausted creativity. He was even interested in the sounds of somebody moving about in his house — still far down — climbing upward.

He reached for the flex and switched the light on. The footsteps sounded less tentative. From more determined, they became downright aggressive as they reached the landing.

‘Why, Boo,’ he said when she stood beside the bed, ‘what sort of party have you come from?’

For Olivia Davenport was dressed in a man’s black suit, its austerity barely holding out against the luxury of her figure. Over her travesty she was wearing a long bottle-green cloak kept together at the throat by a silver chain. A shaving brush stood erect at the back of her Borsalino.

She began hectoring at once: ‘This is no laughing matter, Hurtle.’ Certainly she was dead pale, but a pallor which might have been assisted. ‘Hero has almost killed herself. She didn’t want you to be told, but I felt you ought to be — as you drove her to it.’

‘Where is she?’ On all fours, he had begun to search for his lost shoes.

‘At her house. She telephoned. Fortunately I was free to go.’

As he was groping amongst the fluff and splinters, Olivia told how Hero had tried to open her veins.

‘If she had succeeded, you would have been responsible. Wouldn’t you?’ It was her pleasure to rub it in.

‘If she had wanted to succeed, she would have,’ he said rather wearily putting on his shoes. ‘Only then she wouldn’t have been able to indulge herself on the telephone.’

Olivia didn’t gush tears, but wilted somewhat inside her drag; what she said sounded soggy-nosed: ‘Always the people one loves most end up the most unlovable.’

‘Has Hero let you down?’

‘Oh— Hero! Don’t be ridiculous — irrelevant!’ But Olivia herself had faltered into irrelevance: she couldn’t resist, at least with her eyes, foraging around for paintings.

‘What’s this?’ she gasped, though she might have known, and he didn’t bother to tell her she was bending over the reason for Hero’s false suicide.

‘Ohhh!’ she began moaning in crescendo, and here he was reminded of Hero, only Olivia’s was a contralto voice. ‘I wonder if you know how good you are? But of course you do! You’re too detached, too hateful, not to.’

He had a strong desire to eat something before facing further hysterics.

But Olivia turned on him. ‘You’ve made me drunk!’ She did actually appear to reel inside the swirling cloak. ‘May I kiss you for it, Duffield?’ She didn’t wait to be allowed. ‘If Hero had more taste, she might respect you as an artist though she can’t love you as a man.’

Going downstairs he tried to remember what, if anything, he had in the fridge: while Olivia talked on about — love? art? — he couldn’t be bothered to work out which, according to Olivia, was which.

‘Don’t you agree?’ she called out.

He called back: ‘Yes. Oh, yes! ’

‘I don’t believe you were listening. What were you thinking about?’ she asked.

‘Cold sausage!’ he remembered in triumph.

Olivia also remembered. ‘Poor little Hero!’ She began to suck her teeth and whimper. ‘Only a woman could understand her behaviour.’

‘Why,’ he asked, ‘did you go to her dressed up as a man?’

Olivia slightly hesitated. ‘I look well in it,’ she said in an honest voice: then she added with a hard dry laugh: ‘And because women cling to their illusions — even after they’ve tried to kill themselves.’

He had found the plateful of sausages. Under their film of fat, the cold cooked sausages were glowing: a milky, opalescent blue. He remembered from Mumbelong a dented baking-tin left out for cats, its dregs of milk transformed by the frost into a skin of bluish ice; human skins turning blue with cold, or gin; old men in particular, their veins, and foreskins from which the former brazen stream had dwindled to an anxious trickle.