John Banville - Ghosts

And I was alone, despite the presence of the others. How to be alone even in the midst of the elbowing crowd, that is another of those knacks that the years in captivity had taught me. It is a matter of inward stillness, of hiding inside oneself, like an animal in cover, while the hounds go pounding past. Oh, I know only too well how this will seem: that I had retreated into solitude, that I was living in a fantasy world, a world of pictures and painted figures and all the rest of it. But that is not it, no, that is not it at all. It is only that I was trying to get as far away as possible from everything. I had tried to get away from myself, too, but in vain. The Chinese, or perhaps it was the Florentines of Dante’s day — anyway, some such fierce and unforgiving people — would bind a murderer head and toe to the corpse of his victim and sling this terrible parcel into a dungeon and throw away the key. I knew something of that, here in my oubliette, lashed to my ineluctable self, not to mention … well, not to mention. What I was striving to do was to simplify, to refine. I had shed everything I could save existence itself. Perhaps, I thought, perhaps it is a mistake: perhaps I should be shouldering the emcumbrances of life instead of throwing them off? But no, I wanted not to live — I would have others to do that for me — but only to endure. True, there is no getting away from the passionate attachment to self, that I-beam set down in the dead centre of the world and holding the whole rickety edifice in place. All the same, I was determined at least to try to make myself into a — what do you call it? — a monomorph: a monad. And then to start again, empty. That way, I felt, I might come to understand things, in however rudimentary a fashion. Small things, of course. Simple things.

But then, there are no simple things. I have said this before, I shall say it again. The object splits, flips, doubles back, becomes something else. Under the slightest pressure the seeming unit falls into a million pieces and every piece into a million more. I was myself no unitary thing. I was like nothing so much as a pack of cards, shuffling into other and yet other versions of myself: here was the king, here the knave, and here the ace of spades. Nor did it seem possible to speak simply. I would open my mouth and a babble would come pouring out, a hopeless glossolalia. The most elementary bit of speech was a cacophony. To choose one word was to exclude countless others, they thronged out there in the darkness, heaving and humming. When I tried to mean one thing the buzz of a myriad other possible meanings mocked my efforts. Everything I said was out of context, necessarily, and every plunge I made into speech inevitably ended in a bellyflop. I wanted to be simple, candid, natural — I wanted to be, yes, I shall risk it: I wanted to be honest — but all my striving provoked only general hoots of merriment and rich scorn.

My case, in short, was what it always had been, namely, that I did one thing while thinking another and in this welter of difference I did not know what I was. How then was I to be expected to know what others are, to imagine them so vividly as to make them quicken into a sort of life?

Others? Other: they are all one. The only one.

Not to mention.

And yet it all went on, went on without stop, and every moment of it had to be lived, used up, somehow; not a lapse, not the tiniest falter in the flow; a life sentence. Even sleep was no escape. In the mornings I would get up exhausted, as if part of me had been out all night roving in the dark like a dog in rut. Such dreams I had, immense elaborations, they wore me out. What were they for, I wondered? They were like alibis, fiendishly intricate versions of an event the true circumstances of which I dared not admit, even to myself, that I remembered. To whom was I offering these implausible farragos, before what judge was I arraigned? Not that I imagined I was innocent, only I would have liked to see the face of my oneiric accusers. I remember the first dream I had, the very first night I slept here. I have no idea what it signified, if it signified anything. I was somewhere in the Levant, at the gates of a vast, grey, crumbling city, at evening, with my mother. She was nothing at all like her real self as I recalled it, but very brisk, very much the intrepid traveller, rigged out in tweeds and a broad-brimmed hat and wielding a stout stick. She kept stopping and hectoring me, the laggard son stumbling at her heels in his city shoes and sag-arsed trousers, overweight and sweating and risibly middle-aged. When we entered the city we found ourselves at once in a high, narrow alleyway lined with stalls. There were many people and a great hubbub of voices and eastern music and the mellifluous shrillings of merchants crying their wares. This is the gold market, my mother said to me, speaking very loudly close to my ear. There was a sumptuous shine in the air, as if the light were coming not from the sky but rising spontaneously from the countless precious things laid out around us, the ornaments and piled plates and great beaten bowls. We pressed on through the winding streets, into the heart of the town. There were mosques and minarets and arched gateways and houses with latticed windows giving on to courtyards where lemon trees grew in enormous stone pots. Everything was made of the same grey stone, a sort of pumice only darker, which was wrong, it should have been something hard and smooth and almost precious, like marble, or porphyry, whatever that is. Evening was coming on, and now there was no one to be seen, and our footsteps echoed along the little streets. It is Ramadan, my mother said softly. At that moment suddenly under a dim archway before us two boys appeared, slender, barefoot, honey-skinned, wearing faded robes that swirled about them loosely as they moved. They crossed the archway at a dancing run from left to right, lithe and swift as monkeys, bearing above their heads a gleaming shell of beaten gold the size and shape of an inverted coracle but so delicate and light it seemed to float on the tips of their fingers. They laughed, making soft, trilling noises deep in their throats. Were they playing a game, or was it some marvellous, ritual task they were performing? I saw them only for a second and then they were gone, and my mother too was gone from my side, and it was all so real, so fraught with mysterious significance, that I began to cry in my sleep, and woke up sobbing my heart out, like a child.

There are the nightmares too, of course, the recurring ones, lit with a garish, unearthly glow, in which the dead speak to me: flesh, burst bone, the slow, secret, blue-black ooze. I shall not try to recount them, these bloodstained pageants. They are no use to me. They are only a kind of lurid tinkering that my fancy indulges in, the crackles and jagged sparks thrown off by the spinning dynamo of my overburdened conscience. It is not the dead that interest me now, no matter how piteously they may howl in the chambers of the night. Who, then? The living? No, no, something in between; some third thing.

Dreams, then waking. At times it was hard to tell the difference; I would drift out of riotous slumber and get up and walk around in a hazy, shallow state that seemed only a calmer, less tormented form of sleep than that which had gone before. I tramped the roads in the chill of dawn while a white sun came up tremblingly out of the sea. Everything is strange at that hour, stranger than usual, I mean: the world looks as I imagine it will look after I am dead, wide and empty and streaked with long shadows, shocked somehow and not quite solid, all odd-angled light and shifting facades. These open vistas — so much sky! — alarmed me. I was permanently dizzy, clinging for dear life to our flying island, and there was constantly a sort of distant ringing in my ears. It felt like early morning all day long, there was that fizzing in the blood, that taste of metal in the mouth. The days hung heavy, falling towards night. We watched in silence the unremitting, slow advance of time. Here on Devil’s Island we are not allowed the illusion of highs and troughs, of sudden speedings up, of halts and starts. There is only the steady, glacial creep that carries all along with it. Sometimes I fancied I could feel the planet itself hurtling ponderously through space in its bubble of bright air. I had my moments of rebellion, of course, when I would scramble up from the slimed flagstones and rattle my shackles in rage, shouting for the non-existent jailer. Mostly, though, I was content, or calm, at least, with the febrile calm of the chronic invalid. That’s it, that’s what this place is most like, not a prison or a pilgrimage isle, but one of those Sanatoriums that were so numerous when I was a child and half the world had rotting lungs. Yes, I see myself up here in those first weeks and months immured behind a wall of glass, peering out in a feverish daze over serried blue pines while a huge sun declined above a distant river valley. Heights, I have always sought the heights, physical if not moral. It is not grandeur I crave, not the mossy crag or soaring peak, but the long perspective, the distance, the diminution of things. I had hardly arrived here before I found myself tramping up the fields behind the house to the oak ridge. Wonderful prospect from this lofty crest, the near green and the far blue and that strip of ash-white beach holding up an enormity of sea and sky, the whole scene clear and delicate, like something by Vaublin himself, a background to one of his celebrated pèlerinages or a delicate fête galante. From this vantage I could make out in the fields around me a curious, ribbed pattern in the turf. I wondered if vines perhaps had grown here once (vines, in these latitudes! — what an ignoramus I am), but the spinster who runs the post office in the village put me right. ‘Potato drills,’ she told me, shouting because for some reason she took me for a foreigner (which, when I think of it, I suppose I am). ‘From before the famine times, that was.’ A thousand souls lived here then. I picture them, in their cawbeens and their shawls, straggling down the path to the beach and the waiting black ship, the men fixed on something distant and the women looking back out of huge, stricken eyes. Cythera, my foot. Such suffering, such grief: unimaginable. No, that’s not right. I can imagine it. I can imagine anything.