John Banville - Ghosts

He went on. Sweat dimmed his sight. The band of his hat was greasy and hot and there was sand in his waterlogged shoes, hard ridges of it under his arches and wedged against his toes, making his corns pain him. The way grew steeper, the smooth slope rising before him like a wall; up there on the crest of the rise the wind was lifting fine swirls of sand and the sky beyond was a surprised, dense blue. A thick stench assailed him. A dead sheep lay crumpled in the sand, the head twisted sideways and the dainty black hoofs splayed. It must have lost its footing and tumbled down the dunes and broken its neck. Something had eaten out the hindquarters; the empty fleece, still intact, flapped in the wind, so that the dead thing seemed to be shuddering in pain and struggling to yank itself to its feet. He passed it by, trying not to breathe the smell, and caught the shine of a glazed muzzle and the black hole of an eye-socket. He coughed, spat, groaned. He hardly knew where he was any more, there was only this slope and the dazzling glitter of sunlight and the burning sand squirming under his feet. He wanted to get to the sea; he would be all right if only he could get to the sea. He heard the music the island makes, the deep song rising out of the earth, and thought he must be imagining it. He stumbled on, his heart wobbling in its cage and the salt air rasping in his lungs. After a dozen paces he halted again and turned. The boys were still behind him, keeping their distance. They stopped when he stopped and stood impassive, watching him. He shouted and shook his fist at them. Why would they not help him? Surely they could see he was in need of help. He was frightened. He thought he was going to cry. There was sand in his mouth now. What is that word? Anabasis. No. Descant. No, no, that thing, that gold thing, what is it! As if in a dream he watched his leaden feet slog through the sand, one sinking as the other rose, then that one sinking in its turn. How had he come to this, what had gone wrong, and so quickly? He saw the canary again, the light in the window of the cramped front room and the old man in the big high bed. Yes, yes, that was it, she had bought the bird for him at the end, to keep him company — To pipe me out! the old man would shout, laughing and coughing, amused and furious. He heard again the harsh laugh and the voice weary with contempt: My son, the comedian. Down the narrow stairs, the years falling away and suddenly he was a child again, the hall with the lino gleaming and that worn quarter-circle inside the door where the flap dragged, and out into the square, hand in her hand, the drinking trough and the cherry trees in blossom in their wire cages, and then the big, wide, echoing corridor ablaze with grainy light and the tall nun’s rapid step on the bumpy tiles — never see their feet — and her thin, high voice saying something about prayers and being good.

Mother! Hold me!

He gained the crest of the slope and stood for a moment swaying, looking out in slack-jawed amazement over the beach and the blue-green vasts of water, smelling the stink of sand and wrack. The wind blew his hat off and bowled it down the slope behind him. He set off across the beach at a stumbling run, yearning towards the ocean, his long arms swinging and his knees going out sideways. At the margin of the waves he halted. Above him the sun was a wafer of white gold shaking and slipping at the centre of the huge blue. He stretched out his arms. He was laughing or crying, he did not know which.

That gold

That thing that gold

He shut his eyes and it was as if a door had slammed shut inside his head.

The boys appeared over the brow of the dunes in time to see him rise up slowly on one leg, like a big old dying bird, his arms clutching helplessly at hoops of air. He wavered a moment, then slowly toppled over and collapsed full-length upon the sand.

*

I dreamed last night that — No, no, I can’t. Some dreams are too terrible to be told.

Pain in my breast suddenly. Ah! it pains. Perhaps I am the one who is dying of his heart. That would be a laugh, for me to die and leave them there, trapped, the tide halted, the boat stuck fast forever. End it all, space and time, one huge flash and then darkness and a blessed silence as the babble stops. Serve them right. Serve us all right. We are the dangerous ones, no other species like us, all of creation cowering before us, the death-dealers. I see a forked beast squatting on the midden of the world, red-eyed, regardant, gnawing on a shinbone: poor, dumb destroyer. Better without us, better the nothing than this, this shambles we have raised. Yes, have done with it all: one universal neck and I the hangman. In the end. Not yet. In the end.

Vaublin’s double. Curious episode. (See how quicky I recover my poise?) All the experts, Professor Kreutznaer included, agree that it was all a delusion, a phantasm spawned by fever and exhaustion in that last, desperate summer of the painter’s brief life. I am not so sure. The deeper I look into the matter the stranger it becomes. He was living on the Île de la Cité, last resting place in his fitful wanderings at the end, in big rooms high above the Seine. He was thirty-seven; his lungs were ruined. The paintings from that period, hurried dream-scapes bathed in an eerie, lunar radiance, have a shocked look to them, the motionless, inscrutable figures scattered about the canvas like the survivors of a vast calamity of air and light. What he is seeking here is something intangible, some pure, distilled essence that perhaps is not human at all. He speaks in one of his last letters of coming to the realisation that the centre of a painting, that packed point of equilibrium out of which every element of the composition flows and where at the same time everything is ingathered, is never where it seems it should be, is never central, or obviously significant, but could be a patch of sky, the fold of a gown, a dog scratching its ear, anything. The trick is to locate that essential point and work outwards from it. By now he had given himself up entirely to theatricality. The actors from the Comédie-Française sat for him in costume, all the leading figures, Paul Poisson, La Thorillière, the tragedienne Charlotte Desmares, Biancolelli whose Pierrot was the talk of the season. They were perfect for his purposes, all pose and surface brilliance. They would strike an attitude and hold it for an hour without stirring, in a trance of self-regard. He was drawing too on his memories of the fêtes and staged spectacles years before in the great gardens of the city. Those green and umber twilights of which he was so fond are surely recollections of the Duchesse de Maine’s grands nuits at Sceaux, the soft shadows among the trees, the music on the water, the masked figures strolling down the long lawns as the last light of evening turned to blackening dusk and the little bats came out and flittered in the darkening air. The melancholy that was always his mark is mingled in these final scenes with a kind of shocked hilarity. The luminance in which they are bathed seems always on the point of being extinguished, as if it had its source in the little palpitant flame of the painter’s own enfeebled, failing life.

When the notion came to him of a shadowy counterpart stalking him about the city he thought the thing must be a joke, an elaborate hoax got up perhaps by someone with a grudge against him — he had always been of a suspicious nature. In the street an acquaintance would stop and stare in surprise, saying he had seen him not five minutes ago walking in the opposite direction and wearing a black cloak. He was not amused. Then he began to notice the pictures. There were fêtes galantes and amusements champêtres , and even theatre scenes, his speciality, the figures in which seemed to look at him with suppressed merriment, knowingly. They were executed in a style uncannily like his own, but in haste, with technical lapses and scant regard for quality of surface. This slapdash manner seemed a gibe aimed directly at him and his pretensions, mocking his lapses in concentration, the shortcuts and the technical flaws that he had thought no one would notice. When he tried to get a close look at this or that piece somehow he was always foiled. He would glimpse a Récréation galante being carried between two aproned porters out of a dealer’s shop, or a gold and green Île enchantée , which for a dizzy second seemed surely his own work, hanging over the fireplace of a fashionable salon just as he was being ushered from the room. Who was this prankster who could dash off imitation Vaublins with such assurance, who knew his secret flaws, who could imitate not only his strengths but his weaknesses too, his evasions, his failures of taste and technique? He tells in a letter to his friend and obituarist, the collector Antoine de La Roque, of having a feeling constantly of being hindered; some days, he says, he has almost to fight his way to the easel, as if indeed there were an invisible double there before him, crowding him aside, and when he steps to the canvas another, heavier arm seems to lift alongside his. I seem to hear mocking laughter , he wrote, and someone is always standing in the corner behind me, yet when I turn there is no one there.