John Banville - Ghosts

The crowded assortment of trees — oaks, poplars, umbrella pine — suggests a park or pleasure garden by the sea. Is this a calculated irony, a mocking gesture towards our feeble notions of pastoral? We have only to look more closely and the wildness of the scene becomes apparent. The wind blows, the clouds tumble, the trees shiver before the encroaching dark, while that statue of the scowling satyr — Pan, is it, or Silenus? — looks down stonily upon the action, his fleshy lips curled. Perhaps this tawny light is not the light of evening but of storm; if so, has the tempest passed, or is it only gathering? And whence comes this fierce luminescence falling full on Pierrot’s breast, transforming his white tunic into a shining cuirass? It is as if some radiant being were alighting behind us from out of the sky and shedding upon him the glare of its shining wings.

*

The question has frequently been asked if the figures ranged behind Pierrot are the products of the artist’s imagination or portraits of real people, actors from the Comédie-Française, perhaps, or the painter’s friends and acquaintances, got up in the costumes of clowns and carnival types. They have a presence that is at once fugitive and fixed. They seem to be at ease, languorous almost, yet when we look close we see how tense they are with self-awareness. We have the feeling they are conscious of being watched, as they set off down the slope towards that magically insubstantial ship wreathed round with cherubs that awaits them on the amber shore with sails unfurled. The boy at the rear of the little procession is puzzled and frowning, while his slighter, somewhat wizened companion seems prey to a sort of angry longing. The woman dressed in black casts a backward glance that is at once wistful and resigned. The mood she suggests is a complex one; it is as if she were on her way to a sublimer elsewhere yet filled with regret for the creaturely world that she is leaving. There is about her a suggestion of the divine. If this is the Golden World, or the last of it, is she perhaps Astraea, regretfully withdrawing into the innocent sky? And is it Pierrot upon whom her last, lingering glance is fixed, or something or someone beyond him, which it is not our privilege to see?

The little girl with braided hair who leads the woman by the hand is eager to be away; what is Aphrodite’s island to her, what does she know yet of the pains of love? At the other extreme of this little human chain of youth and age is the old man in the straw hat who looks away from us, over his shoulder, as if he has just now heard someone call to him from the shadows under the trees.

The presence of the donkey has puzzled many commentators. This creature is simultaneously one of the most mysterious and most immediate of the group, despite the fact that we see no more of it than a part of the head and one, pricked-up ear, and, of course, that single, soft, auburn, unavoidable eye. What is it that looks at us here? There is curiosity in its look, and apprehensiveness, and a kind of startled awe. We see in this unwavering gaze the windy stable and the stony road, the dawn-light in the icy yard and the rain-lashed corner of the field at evening; we feel the hunger and the beatings, the moment of brutish warmth in the byre, we taste the harsh straw of winter and the lush grass in the summer meadow. It is the eye of Nature itself, gazing out at us in a kind of stoic wonderment — at us, the laughing animal, the mad animal, the inexplicable animal.

Of that smirking Harlequin mounted on the donkey’s back we shall not speak. No, we shall not speak of him.

At the window of that distant tower — we shall need a magnifying glass for this — a young woman is watching, waiting perhaps for some figure out of romance to come by and rescue her.

What happens does not matter; the moment is all. This is the golden world. The painter has gathered his little group and set them down in this wind-tossed glade, in this delicate, artificial light, and painted them as angels and as clowns. It is a world where nothing is lost, where all is accounted for while yet the mystery of things is preserved; a world where they may live, however briefly, however tenuously, in the failing evening of the self, solitary and at the same time together somehow here in this place, dying as they may be and yet fixed forever in a luminous, unending instant.

I CONFESS I had avoided them all day. Oh, I know I pretended that I recognised in them what I had been waiting for since I first came here, the motley troupe who would take me into their midst and make a man of me, but the truth is I was afraid of them. I am not tough, not worldly-wise at all. It takes courage to expose yourself to the possibilities of the world and I am not a courageous man. I want only comfort, what little of it can be squeezed out of this life on a planet to which I have always felt ill-adapted. Their coming was a threat to the delicate equilibrium I had painstakingly established for myself. I was like a hungry old spider suddenly beset by a terrifying swarm of giant flying things. The web shook and I scuttled off into the foliage for shelter, legs flailing and eyes out on stalks. I saw old Croke walk up the hill and saw him too when he returned, staggering, from the beach where he had fallen, with the boy at his heels. I watched from hiding as Sophie set off into the hills to find the ruins she had come to photograph. I witnessed Felix pacing the lawn in the sun with a hand in his side pocket, smoking a cheroot. Oh yes, I skulked. And when late in the afternoon I screwed up my nerve and ventured back into the house it was I who seemed the intruder.

The kitchen was deserted. The debris of their lunch was still on the table, looking disturbingly like the remains of a debauch. I poured out the tepid dregs of Licht’s chicken soup and ate it standing at the stove. I wanted one of them to come in and find me there. I would nod in friendly fashion and perhaps say something about the weather, claiming by this show of ease that I was the true inhabitant of the house while they were merely transients. No one came, however, and anyway, if someone had, probably I would have dropped my soup bowl and taken to my heels in a blue funk. I have always suffered from a tendency to generate panic out of my own fears and imaginings; I think it is a common weakness of the self-obsessed. There are moments of quiet and isolation when I can feel within me clearly the tiny, ceaseless tremor of impending hysteria that someday may break out and overwhelm me entirely. What is its source? It is the old emptiness, I suppose, the black vacuum the self keeps rushing into yet can never fill. I’m sure there is a formula for it, some elegant and simple equation balancing the void on one side and the endless inward spin of essence on the other. It is how I think of myself, eating myself alive, consuming myself always and yet never consumed.

Some incarnation this is, I have achieved nothing, nothing. I am what I always was, alone as always, locked in the same old glass prison of myself.

Why is it, I wonder, that silent, sunlit afternoons always remind me of childhood? Was there some marvellous moment of happiness that I have forgotten, some interval of stillness and radiance in which the enchanted child lingered on the forest path while his other self stepped out of him and blundered on oblivious into the dark entanglements of the future? I stood in the ancient light of the hallway for a long time, gazing up into the shadows thronging on the stairs, listening for them, for the sounds of their voices, for life going on. I do not know what I expected: cries, perhaps, arguments, sobs, wild laughter. I had got out of the way of ordinary things, you see; life, being what others did, must be all alarms and confrontations and matters coming to a head. I could hear nothing, or not nothing, exactly, only that faint, pervasive pressure in the air, that soundless hum that betrays the presence of humankind. How thoroughly the house had absorbed them, as if they really were the ones who belonged here; as if they had come home.