John Banville - Mefisto

He took out his tobacco tin and lit up a butt, and watched me through the smoke, still smiling.

— Now don’t get down in the dumps, he said. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. It was just a sort of accident.

— An accident, I said.

He tittered.

— But of course, he said, you don’t believe in accidents, do you, I forgot. Everything is a part of the pattern. Well, perhaps poor Anthony’s demise is indeed a link in some grand plan, or plot, but that still doesn’t mean that anyone is to blame, now does it?

He smoked in silence for a while, brooding, then laid a finger on my wrist and said:

— And you’re not to worry, either. Just remember, ships must sail, eventually.

— They come back, too, I said.

He laughed.

— Oh, yes, he said. Die ewige Wiederkunft , eh?

Fat Dan approached, and leaned a forearm on the bar and inclined his head towards me in a confidential manner. Would I be wanting to stay? he wondered.

— Any friend of Mr Felix is welcome here, he said, breathing warm sincerity and smiling.

He led me up a narrow stairs, his great shiny backside swaying ahead of me. I remember him holding a candle, but surely that’s another fantasy. At the back his hair was shaved to the top of his head, where a boyish little lick stuck up. His neck was a big wad of red fat with bristles. On the landing he paused, panting softly, and looked at me with a sort of ogling grin, as though there were some faintly scandalous secret unspoken between us. He nodded back down the stairs, in the direction of the bar, and said:

— He’s a queer card, all the same though, what?

He showed me into a tiny room with a low, sagging ceiling, a single small square window, and an enormous brass bed. The wallpaper, embossed with flower shapes, had once been white, but was now a sticky amber colour, it seemed to have been varnished. The wainscoting was brown, the paint combed to look like grained oak. Dan stood gazing a moment in the doorway with a solemn air.

— This used to be the mammy’s room, one time, he said quietly.

He sighed, and more quietly still he added:

— Before she fell into flesh.

When he was gone I put out the light and sat on the bed in the dark for a long time. The moon was higher now, riding in a corner of the window. I could see the vague shapes of pines outside, swaying in the wind, and beyond them, far off on the sides of the surrounding hills, the little lights of cottages and farms dotted here and there, frail beacons in the midst of so much darkness. I heard the last of the drinkers leave and tramp away along the hill road, and then the sounds of Dan locking up for the night. A dog barked for a while in the distance, listlessly. My scars ached.

What was I thinking about?

Nothing. Numbers.

Nothing.

We tramped the hills for hours, Felix and I, day after day. The weather was windy and bright, the last of spring, the flushed air rife with the singing of larks. It made me giddy, to be for so long up so high. Everything tended skywards here, as if gravity had somehow lost its hold. White clouds would fly up from behind a granite peak, billowing upwards into the zenith. There was nothing to hold on to, all around us as far as the horizon stretched the browns and flat greens of bracken and bog. Then suddenly we would come to a turn in the path and find ourselves on the edge of a stony crater, with a steel-grey lake far below us and a little puff of pale cloud floating in midair.

— Ah, wonderful! Felix cried. Doesn’t it make you feel like something out of Caspar David Friedrich?

He laid a hand on his heart and breathed deep, smiling for bliss, his eyes closed and nostrils flared. He was wearing his plus-fours and his cap, and carried a tall spiked stick. I watched shadows streaming like water down the far flank of the crater.

— What did you say about me to Leitch? I said.

He opened his eyes wide and stared at me in exaggerated startlement. Then he broke into silent laughter, the tip of his tongue coming out and quickly vanishing again.

— Why? he said slyly. Worried for your reputation, are you?

— That was a place to be, I said. Now I can’t go there any more.

At that he laughed out loud, striking his stick on the stony ground.

— Boo hoo! he said, sneering. Listen, that place is finished, you know it. They thought the old boy was doing something brilliant, until they found out he was using their precious machine to prove that nothing can be proved.

He walked to the edge of the path and lifted hieratic arms above the abyss, thrusting the alpenstock aloft.

— O world in chaos! he intoned. Blind energy, spinning in the void! All turns, returns. Thus spake the prophet.

He came back, hobbling and wheezing, a bent old geezer now, using his stick as a crutch, and squinted up into my face.

— Here’s place enough, and time, he said.

Wind swooped past us down the slope and wrinkled the steely surface of the lake. The sunlight sparkled. He took my arm and walked me along slowly, with priestly solicitude.

— Put yourself in my hands, he said. I have high hopes for you, you know. Really, I have.

We rounded another turn in the path and came out on a rocky ledge. From here we could see in the distance a dense blue smear of smoke that was the city. Below us was the pub, and the road winding away. He squeezed my arm against his ribs.

— What do you say, eh? he said. Think of the times we’ve had, you and me. And think of the future.

I went ahead of him, down the side of the hill. On the bridge over the little stream behind the pub I paused to swallow a pill. He stopped a pace behind me, with his head on one side, smiling faintly and scraping in the dust with his stick.

— And behold, he said, angels came and ministered unto him.

I left that night. Felix and I waited in the bar for the time when the bus would arrive. The setting sun blazed briefly in the window, then the shadows gathered. Fat Dan was offended that I would not stay. He wiped the top of the counter with slow strokes of a dishcloth, glancing at me soulfully now and then. In the end, though, curiosity overcame his sense of umbrage, and he edged closer and closer, wielding the cloth in ever narrowing sweeps, and spoke at last.

— Them burns, he said, did you get acid on you, or what?

Felix rolled his eyes.

— It’s the mark of Cain, Dan, he said.

I told my tale. Dan was enthralled, he had never heard such a thing, grafts, tinfoil bandages, all that. He folded his arms on the counter and leaned his plump breasts on his arms and gazed at me in awe, as if it were some marvellous feat I had performed.

— Holy God, he said, you’ve been through the wars, all right.

— And now he’s banished, in the land of Nod, Felix said.

Dan paid him no heed, but glanced about the bar, as if there might be someone who would overhear, and leaned closer to me with a portentous air.

— Come here, he said, come on here, now.

He took down a big iron key from a hook behind him, and lifted the flap of the counter and stood back to let me enter. I looked at Felix. He shrugged.

— Go ahead, he said. There are some things even I don’t know.

Dan led the way through a door behind the bar into a narrow, dim passageway with cluttered shelves and crates of bottles on the floor. There was a musty smell of apples and of clay. For a moment I felt I had been here before, long ago. We came to another door. Dan paused with the key in the keyhole.

— I knew you weren’t like them others he brings up here, he said. I knew you were different.

And he smiled and winked.

The room was small, and filled with things. A banked-up coke fire throbbed in the grate. By the fire, in a vast armchair, a vast woman sat. She had a great round head, like the head of a stone statue, and ragged sparse white hair. Her bloated face glistened in the glare of the coals like a glazed mask that had begun to melt. She wore a sort of gown of some heavy shiny black stuff, and a knitted jacket draped over her shoulders like a cape.