John Banville - Mefisto

Felix was sitting in the kitchen, sorting through a collection of old keys of all shapes and sizes spread before him on the table. The room was narrow, with a high ceiling and low windows, their sills level with an unruly patch of lawn outside. There was a chipped sink, and an angry-looking, soot-black stove. The sink was stacked with soiled crockery, and something was bubbling sluggishly in a battered pot on the stove. Felix looked at me and grinned.

— Well, he said, if it isn’t Sweetsir Swansir. Can’t keep away from us, eh?

Sophie peered into the steaming stewpot and wrinkled her nose. She brought plates and mugs and set them out on the table, shoving Felix’s keys unceremoniously to one side. He leaned back with a lazy sigh, studying me idly, one arm hitched over the back of his chair and his thin mouth stretched in a smile. I heard a step behind me. Mr Kasperl had appeared in the doorway.

— And the dead arose and appeared to many! Felix murmured.

The fat man sat down at the table, lowering his bulk heavily on to the chair, which cried out in protest under him. He gouged a knuckle into his eyes, then sat gazing blearily at his plate.

— Had a little rest, did we? Felix shouted playfully, wagging his head at him across the table. Had a little kip?

Sophie brought the saucepan from the stove and ladled a smoking dollop of dark-brown stew on to each plate. Felix waved an arm expansively, inviting me to join them. I sat down opposite Mr Kasperl.

Sophie poured out tea from a blackened pot. There was a little nest of cobwebs in the bottom of my mug. Mr Kasperl coughed moistly one, twice, and then a third time, inclining an ear, as if testing something inside him. The heat hummed, pressing on the house. Birds were singing weakly outside. The high, narrow room teetered above us, as if we were at the bottom of a deep shaft. A scalded spider bobbed to the surface of my tea, turning in slow circles. I felt Mr Kasperl’s gaze directed at me. We looked at each other for a moment. I fancied I could see something stirring, like torpid fish, in the dead depths of his eyes. He stopped chewing suddenly, and, puckering his lips, extracted a piece of gristle from his mouth and set it down with deliberation on the side of his plate. I looked away. Sophie was watching me, and so was Felix. They were all three watching me, with calm and somehow remote attention, as if they had turned to look back at me from the far side of a valley, waiting to see if I would come across and join them.

I MET FELIX IN town one day. He came ambling along Owl Street with his hands in his pockets, whistling. I felt a spasm of that same excitement, a sort of eager fright, that I had felt the first time I saw him, in the grove above the meadow. I thought of turning aside, but he had already seen me. The street was narrow and steep, running athwart a hill above the harbour. The spire of the Church of the Assumption beetled over the rooftops, seeming somehow in flight. There was a smell of sea-wrack, and a gamy stench from a poulterer’s yard up a lane.

— Hello, whooper, he said. Going my way?

— No, I said, I …

— Oh well, I’ll go yours, then.

He grinned.

We walked down the hill towards the harbour. Sunlight lay along one side of the street, wedged at the foot of a deep diagonal of shadow. Few people were about. An old man in rags was crossing the road on a crutch. At each laborious step he brought his left foot down on the asphalt with an angry bang. He stopped in the gutter and waited intently, panting, as we went past. From this high place we could look out over the town, a huddle of dark geometry spread before us in the summer haze. Felix paused, and took a cigarette butt from his box and fingered it thoughtfully, picking charred crumbs of tobacco from the blackened tip.

— I’ve been talking to your auntie, he said. She says you’re a wizard with figures.

He struck a match and held the flame suspended, and glanced at me sideways.

— That right? he said.

Out in the harbour a marker bell was ringing and ringing. I could feel the blood flooding into my face. I walked on quickly, and Felix followed. Behind me the cripple banged his hoof, and, unless I imagine it, laughed.

We turned into Goat Alley. Already Felix knew his way about these back streets. He steered me across a sunny yard behind a fishmonger’s shop and down a narrow flight of slimed stone steps. A rat scuttled ahead of us, dragging a fish-head in its teeth. We came abruptly on to the quayside. The sea was high, swaying sluggishly beyond the woodworks like the smooth pale humped back of something living. A bronze pikeman, sombrely agleam in the sunlight, pointed a rope-veined forearm in the direction of the railway station. We crossed to the woodworks. Beneath us we could hear the tide’s vague slap and slither. Felix threw his fag-end into the water, it made a tiny hiss. In the harsh sea-light the whites of his eyes were soiled, and the skin around his eyes was taut, as if from a scorching, and scored with tiny wrinkles like cracks in a china glaze. The breeze brought me a waft of his breath, laden with the smell of smoke and the metallic tang of his bad teeth. I could smell his clothes too, with the sun on them, the shiny, pinstriped jacket with its prolapsed pockets and wilting lapels, the concertina trousers, the shoes like boats.

— Mr Kasperl was asking about you, he said. Wanted to know who you were. I told him. I said, he’s a prodigy, that boy. He was interested.

— Why, I said, why was he asking about me?

— Eh? Oh, I don’t know. The subject came up. Listen, here’s a good one. How does a lady hold her liquor? By the ears. Ha!

We walked on. Our footsteps thudded on the tarred boards, the sea sucked and slapped. Felix talked and talked. He put on his funny voices, did impressions, recounted queer stories. He talked about the war, about the Germans and the Japs, and the sulphur bombs that were dropped on Dresden. He knew all the facts, the figures. He stopped suddenly and struck a pose, with one hand on his heart and the other pointing heavenward, and gaily sang:

Oh, the Jews nailed Jesus,

But Jesus screwed the Jews!

He speculated about the last secret of Fatima, which is so terrible the Pope keeps it sealed in a vault in the Vatican. Maybe, he said, maybe it had something to do with the three dark days that will herald the end of the world, when nothing will light except blessed candles made of beeswax. He clapped his hands and cackled.

— Get that candle out! he cried. As the Mother Superior said to the nun.

We left the quay and walked up through the town. The main street was busy. Felix smiled on everything, as if all this, the streets, the people, the shop windows decked with corsets and carpenter’s tools, had been laid on specially for his amusement. The housewives doing their shopping eyed us with interest. They all knew Felix. He greeted them genially, waving and bowing, doffing an imaginary tri-corn, and all the while making disparaging remarks to me about them out of the side of his mouth. We passed by the malt store, and the place where the Horse River ran under the road, and so came to our square. We stopped under the trees, by the horse trough, a metal tub surmounted by an iron swan painted white, that spouted a weak jet of water through a rusted beak.

— Swan, Felix said, pointing. Ha ha.

This was where, years ago, the dwarf used to sit on his tricycle and talk to me, smoothing a hand on his oiled hair and shooting his immaculate cuffs. Felix lounged against the trough, his arms and ankles crossed. Suddenly I wanted to tell him something, anything, to confide in him, the urge was so strong that for a second tears prickled under my eyelids and my throat grew thick. He was watching me with a little smile, his eyes narrowed against the light.