John Banville - Mefisto

— What’s your name, my man? he said,

— Swan, sir.

He fell back a pace with an extravagant stare, pressing a hand to his breast.

— Swansir ?

— No, sir. Swan.

— Aha. A cygnet, by Jove.

He took out a dented tin box half filled with cigarette butts, selected one with care, and lit it. He had bad teeth, and a tremor in his hands. He smoked in silence thoughtfully, his head tilted, looking at me with one eye shut.

— My name, he said, is Felix.

He grinned, showing a blackened eye-tooth. The fat man and the girl had advanced across the grass, and stood now below us at the edge of the copse, bending forward a little out of the glare and peering up at us with impassive attention. The girl’s long, heart-shaped face was slightly lopsided, as if the left half had slipped a fraction, giving her an expression at once eager and wistful. She was older than I had first thought, a woman, almost. Felix turned to them and called out:

— Swan, he says his name is.

They made no reply, and he looked at me again and winked.

— That, he said, pointing with his thumb, that is Mr Kasperl.

I began to back away. The girl smiled at me suddenly, and touched the fat man on the shoulder and made a complicated gesture with her hands, but he paid her no heed. Felix, watching me retreat, flicked away his fag-end, and slid his hands into his pockets and grinned.

— Bye bye, bird-boy, he said.

I hurried down the tree-lined avenue, prey to a kind of brimming agitation. I could still see vividly Mr Kasperl’s seagull eye, Felix’s white, hairless wrists, the girl’s sudden smile. Wind roared through the tops of the trees, like something plunging past on its way to wreak havoc elsewhere. I came to the main road, and did not look back. When I got home the house seemed altered, as if some small, familiar thing had been quietly removed.

I next saw Felix and the fat man at Black’s Hotel, where my aunt was the manageress. It was morning, and the place had a hangover smell. In the bar the chairs were stacked on the tops of the tables, and a barman in shirt-sleeves stood with his ankles crossed, leaning on the handle of a sweeping-brush. Upstairs somewhere a maid was singing raucously. I padded like a phantom along the hushed corridors. It was like being behind the scenes of some large, frowzy stage production. I spied Mr Kasperl sitting alone by a sunny window in the deserted dining room, drinking coffee, and gazing out at the street with a remote expression. Aunt Philomena was in the cubbyhole she called her office. The air was dense with the reek of face powder and stale cigarette smoke. She was my father’s sister, a tall, top-heavy woman, spider-like in her black skirt and black twinset, with her skinny legs and big behind and bright, demented eyes. I had come to tell her, let me see, to tell her — oh, what does it matter, I can’t think of anything. I was about to leave when Felix put his head around the door and began speaking breezily, calling my aunt by her first name. Seeing me, he stopped. There was silence for a second, and then he said:

— Well well, who have we here?

Aunt Philomena smiled frantically and blushed, picking up things on her desk and putting them down again.

— Oh, this, she said, as though advancing an extenuating circumstance, this is my brother’s boy.

Felix raised an eyebrow.

— You don’t say? he said.

He had recognized me at once, of course.

I walked back along the hushed corridors, past the bar and the barman, and the dining room with its solitary occupant, and came out by a rear door into dazzling sunlight. A brewer’s dray was backed into the yard, and men in leather aprons were heaving barrels into the cellar. Smelling the bilious stink of beer-suds, I suddenly remembered playing here one autumn day, years before, with a laughing little boy in a sailor suit, who was staying with his parents at the hotel. He had caught a frog, which he kept in a biscuit tin. Watch this, he said to me, and stuck a straw down the frog’s gullet and blew its belly up like a balloon. I remember the mossy autumnal smell in the yard, the square of blue sky above us with small, pale-gold clouds. I remember the boy’s elfin face squeezed up with laughter, and his little wet tongue wedged fatly at the corner of his mouth. I remember the frog too, the pale distended belly, the twitching legs, the eyes that seemed about to pop out of their sockets. The boy kept blowing it up and letting it deflate again. Can that be possible? It’s what I remember, what does it matter whether it’s possible or not. The thing seemed unable to die. At last it fell on the ground with a wet smack, like a sodden glove, and squirmed into a corner, trying to get away. Oh no you don’t! the little boy said, and laughed, and stamped down hard with the heel of his patent-leather shoe. There was a noise like a loud belch, and something pink flew up in an arc and splattered on the ground behind me. Billy, that was the boy’s name, I’ve just remembered it. Billy, yes. But patent-leather shoes? A sailor suit?

Mr Kasperl came in from Ashburn to the hotel every morning and sat in the dining room for an hour, drinking coffee and brooding by the window. People passing by in the street peered in at him, not inquisitively, but with a faint, dreamy smile, forgetting themselves. It was as if something such as he had long been expected, and now it had arrived at last, and was only a little disappointing. Sometimes Felix came with him, and prowled about the hotel with his hands in his pockets, talking to the waitresses and the kitchen staff and the girls who did the beds. He made them laugh. He had an actorly way of speaking, in asides, as it were, as if for the benefit of an invisible audience. He put on different voices too, it was hard to know which one was his own. When he told a joke he would laugh and laugh, and go on laughing after everyone else had fallen uneasily silent, as if there were behind the joke something far funnier that only he knew. He was a scream, everyone said so. Only Mr Kasperl seemed impervious to his wit. The fat man would look at him blankly, in silence, and Felix would turn and tiptoe away, doubled up in soundless mirth, a hand clapped over his mouth and his eyebrows waggling.

Aunt Philomena was captivated. Felix and Mr Kasperl were so different from the usual clientele at Black’s, the travelling salesmen and the fat-necked cattle-buyers, so coarse, so prosaic. This pair were like something she herself might have invented, for she was given to fantasies, and saw herself always at the centre of some impossible drama. She shared the family home in Queen Street with Uncle Ambrose. When she came to our house now she wore a look of triumph, as if with the arrival of Felix and the fat man all her wild flights had somehow, at last, been vindicated. She told us of Mr Kasperl’s little ways, how he liked his coffee strong and boiling hot, and how some days he would stir himself suddenly and call for a glass of brandy, and drink it off in one go, with a brisk snap of the head.

— And that coat! she cried. And the galoshes!

His English was not good, it was hard to understand him. His accent made the things he said seem at once profound and quaint, like ancient pronouncements. He was very educated, he had studied everything, philosophy, science, oh, everything! He had given up all that now, though. Saying this, she put on a tragic face, as if she too had renounced weighty things in her time, and knew all about it. I thought of Mr Kasperl sitting alone by the blazing window in Black’s, glooming out at the town like a decrepit god overseeing a world, weary of his own handiwork, but stuck with it.

— What is he doing here, anyway? my mother said. What does he want?

She did not like at all the thought of these people moving into Ashburn, her Ashburn. Aunt Philomena frowned, pursing her vermilion mouth.