John Banville - The Infinities

I have never been any good in dealing with people. I dare say I am not alone in this sad predicament, but I feel acutely my incompetence in the matter of other folk. You know how it is. Say you are walking down a not particularly crowded street. You spy, at quite a long way off still, out of the corner of your eye, out of the corner of your watchfulness, as it were, a stranger who, you can see, has in his turn become aware of you as you approach him. Even at that distance you both begin to make little adjustments, covert little feints and swerves, so as to avoid eventual collision, all the while pretending to be perfectly oblivious of each other. As often as not all your efforts of evasion fail, precisely because you have been making them, I imagine, and in the end one of you is compelled to sidestep clumsily to allow the other to plunge past with a snarling smile. This is the way it is in general, with me, wherever I am, with whomever I happen to be. I am always, always on guard against coming smack up against one of my own kind. And when I am forced to enter on that agitated, long-distance dance of avoidance the broadest pavement becomes a tangled track, and I am as in an unsubdued jungle where the little apes howl and the birds of night scream and scatter. I do not doubt it could be otherwise. There is no reason not to stride forward smiling and clasp the approaching stranger manfully to one’s breast in fellowship and affection. If I remember rightly it was the poet Goethe — entirely forgotten now but in his day there were those who would have ranked him above the sublime Kleist! — who urged that we should greet each other not as monsieur , sir, mein Herr , but as my fellow-sufferer, Socî malorum, compagnon de misères! Or was it Schopenhauer? Not to be able any longer to look anything up — ah! Well, no matter, you get the drift. For my part I would be happy to take this good advice provided I am allowed to send my greetings by semaphore.

I did not see Benny Grace coming, that was the trouble. It was in the far north that I first encountered him — or that he first encountered me, more like — which strikes me as odd, since I think of him as so much a creature of the south. An auditorium, a long, white room abuzz with people, and I in the front row, in a reserved seat, and a woman beside me agitatedly shuffling the text of a talk she was about to give, an ordeal the prospect of which terrified her, although she had undergone it many times before. Her name was Inge, or Ilsa, I wish I could remember which. Let me see: I shall settle for Inge. To open the colloquium there had been a reception — noise, laughter, champagne glasses of sticky white alcoholic syrup — and later on there would be dinner followed by decorous tangoing. One side of the room was a wall of glass looking out on a green slope dotted sparsely with spindly white birches. Were there deer? My memory insists on deer, peacefully at graze among the trees, fastidious long-legged creatures with beige-and-brown coats and stumpy tails that twitched comically. Weak northern sunlight, a delicate lacquering of bleached gold. It was midsummer then, too, the days endless up there in those latitudes. There had been rain, and there would be more, and the grass sparkled, as if with malice. I was aware of Benny first as a pair of hoof-like feet and two fat thighs clad in rusty black, inserting themselves with much squeezing and puffing into the place to my left. Then the globular head and moist, moon face, the smile, the wreathed dome — he was balding even then — and those whorled ears daintily pointed at their tips.

I cannot remember which city it was we were in, or which country, even. We had arrived that day, Inge and I, from elsewhere. Bellicose Sweden, I remember, was on the warpath again, mired in yet another expansionary struggle with her encircling neighbours, and travel throughout the region was hazardous and liable to delays, and I feared being stranded there, chafingly, in Somewhereborg or Somethingsund. Inge was a Swedish Finn, or Finnish Swede, I do not think I ever discovered which, for certain. Ash-blonde, tiny, very slim, child-sized, really, but an earnest savant famous in her field, which was, I recall, gauge theory — gauge was all the rage, at the time. I can see her still, little Inge, her tremulous hands and skinny legs and turned-in toes, can still smell her scrubbed skin and cigarette breath. She was forty and looked twenty, except first thing in the morning and late at night. Dorothy was not long dead and I was adrift in a daze of sorrow and remorse and would have clung to any spar in those dark, immense and turbulent waters. A sense of strangeness, of being generally estranged, comes over one in circumstances such as I was in, I am sure those who have suffered a similarly violent and sudden loss will know what I mean. Everything I did or saw, every surroundings I wandered woozily into, struck me as bizarre, wholly outlandish, and like an idiot child I had to be pulled along by the hand from one baffling spectacle to the next.

I really do wish I could remember more of Inge — I owe it to her, to remember. She took care of me, she who was so much in need of being cared for herself. It seems odd, that in my distress I should have sought out the likes of her and not the strong ones, those big mannish bluestocking types in which my discipline abounds. Helpless myself, I cleaved to the helpless.

I was never a womaniser, not even then, in my wandering year of grief, despite all that was said of me. True, I was and am devoted to women, but not or not exclusively in the expectation of clambering on top of them and pumping away like a fireman at his hose, no, the fascination for me was that transformative moment when one of them would willingly divest herself of her clothes and everything became different on the instant. That was a phenomenon I could never get enough of; it was always a surprise, always left me breathless. How magical it was, how enchanting, when the head I had been talking to in the street, or on a bus, or in the midst of a roomful of people, suddenly, in a shadowed bedroom, unfurled from the neck down this pale, glimmering extension of itself, this body which, naked, was utterly other than what it had been when clothed. And not just the body, but the sensibility, too — a new person on the spot, candid, desirous, intimate, vulnerable. The prospect of the pure astonishment of holding this brand-new, cool-skinned creature in my arms, that was what held me there, in that glassed-in lecture hall, with the sickly taste of cloudberry cordial on my lips and an unyawned yawn making the hinges of my jaws ache, watching Inge, as if she were half blind, make her groping way to the lectern, still mangling her papers, and with a small round dark patch on the seat of her light summer dress where she had peed herself, just a little, in fright at the prospect of standing up and speaking to an audience.

This was in the early days of the great instauration, after we had exposed the relativity hoax and showed up Planck’s constant for what it really is. The air was thick with relativists and old-style quantum mechanics plummeting from high places in despair; I trust they took the opportunity, as they travelled streetwards together, of putting their principles of relative motion and intrinsic spin values to the test. I was in the vanguard of the new science and already an eminent figure in what was, admittedly, at that time, a narrow and specialised sphere. My Brahma hypothesis, so-called — so-called by Benny, in the first place, as it happened — floored them all. In it I posited the celebrated chronotron, ugly name — Benny, again — for an exquisite concept, time’s primal particle, the golden egg of Brahma from the broken yolk of which flowed all creation. Simplicity itself, that theory, once someone had dared to think it. To begin with I was laughed at, of course, always a sure promise of eventual triumph. It took them quite a while to get the point, but when they did, my, what a fuss. Looking back, I see myself borne aloft in triumph on the shoulders of a band of hot-eyed zealots, but a stiff and painted thing, like the effigy of a suffering saint carried in procession on a holy day, rattling a bit from being joggled overmuch, my mitre awry and my big toe shiny from the kisses of so many pious supplicants. I did not ask for their adulation. I was my solitary self when I took a flying kick and put my shiny big toe through their big Theory of Everything. The majority of them I despised. How they fawned and flattered when they saw at last the irrefragable rightness of what I had made. But then, did I not despise myself, also, myself and my work, my capitalised Work, of which I am supposed to be so vain? Oh, not that I think my achievement is less than anyone else’s — in fact I think it is more than everyone else’s, more than what any of my peers could have managed — only it is not enough for me. You take the point. The world is always ready to be amazed, but the self, that lynx-eyed monitor, sees all the subterfuges, all the cut corners, and is not deceived.