Walker Percy - Lancelot

Stop pacing up and down. I’m the prisoner, not you. Why the long race, the frowning preoccupation? Look at the street. Even the cemetery, especially the cemetery, looks cheerful. The mums are still fresh and yellow. The tombs spick-and-span, the rain trees bright as new copper pennies. Yesterday young people were singing in the old section. Some of them even sleep in the oven crypts, shove the bones aside and unroll their sleeping bags, a perfect fit. An odd thing about New Orleans: the cemeteries here are more cheerful than the hotels and the French Quarter. Tell me why that should be, why two thousand dead Creoles should be more alive than two thousand Buick dealers?

Ah, I forgot to tell you my good news. I’m leaving today. They’re discharging me. Psychiatrically fit and legally innocent. I can prove I am sane. Can you? Why do you look at me like that? You don’t think they should? Well, in any case, my lawyer got a writ of habeas corpus and my psychiatrist says I’m fit as a fiddle, saner in fact than he — the poor man is overworked, depressed, and lives on Librium.

Just think of it! At noon I shall walk through the front door of this building for the first time in a year, stroll down that block of Annunciation Street I’ve studied so minutely, turn the corner of Tchoupitoulas, and read that sign there.

Free &

Ma

B

At last I shall know what it says.

Then I shall turn around and look back at this window, reversing the direction of a million looks the opposite way.

It is not a small thing to look back at the place where one has spent a year of one’s life.

Then I shall cross the street to La Branche’s (formerly Zweig’s) Bar and Grill, enter the cool ammoniac gloom where Zweig, La Branche. is mopping the floor of small hexagonal bathroom tile, sit at the bar, and order a Dixie draught and an oyster po’ boy.

Then I shall pick up my little suitcase, which contains my worldly possessions, a change of underwear, one suit, socks, sweater. Bowie knife, and boots, walk to St. Charles, catch the streetcar to Canal Street, close out my bank account at the Whitney (about $4,000), walk to the Union Terminal, and catch the Southerner to Richmond. Think of that. Rocking along through the lonesome pine barrens of Mississippi in this two hundredth anniversary year of the first Revolution into the old red clay cuts of Alabama, gliding into Peachtree Station in Atlanta in the evening, order a few drinks in the club car while the train rambles north in the Georgia twilight. Then off at Richmond in the cold dawn hours and catch a Greyhound for the mountains.

Siobhan? Yes, now that I’m legally sane and competent. I can have her. And I intend to get her from Tex as soon as I’m settled in Virginia. We’ll do fine, if Tex has not bored her to death or driven her out of her mind with his horsh pistols and coinkidinkies. I suppose I should be grateful to him. At least he took care of her. But I wish now I had let her stay with Suellen. Some black people are still sane.

Anna? Oh, she’s well. But she’s not going with me after all. I’m going alone. She’s been kind enough to lend me her place in the Blue Ridge until I can find my own little half acre.

What happened to Anna? Really it’s incredible. I shall never understand women. We were going to have a new life together. I thought we were suited to each other — each stripped of the past, each aware that an end had come and that there had to be a new beginning, just like a man and woman striking out for the territory through the Cumberland Gap in the old days. Then, to my astonishment, I mortally offended her. I suggested that she had suffered the ultimate indignity, the worst violation a woman can suffer, rape at the hands of several men, forced fellatio, and so on, that I too had suffered my own catastrophe, and that since we had both suffered the worst that could happen to us and come through, not merely survived but prevailed, we were qualified as the new Adam and Eve of the new world. If we couldn’t invent a new world and a new dignity between man and woman, surely nobody could.

Do you know that she took offense? In fact she flew into a rage. “Are you suggesting,” she said to me, “that I. myself, me, my person, can be violated by a man ? You goddamn men. Don’t you know that there are more important things in this world? Next you’ll be telling me that despite myself I liked it.”

There is something to what she says. The other day I opened St. Augustine’s The City of God thinking to find what some of your best people had to say about the great questions, God and man and so on. And what do you think I found? The good saint devoting page after page soothing the consciences of nuns, virgins who had been raped by Visigoths and enjoyed it despite themselves. No doubt howled with delight.

So Anna told me to shove off. Very well. I did. Perhaps it is better that way.

I expected too much from her. I expected her to have made the same discovery I made, to have found the great secret of life, the old life that is, the ignominious joy of rape and being raped. We, I thought, she and I, were going to discover something better. And in her heart she knows the secret as well as I but she can’t bear to admit it. Can you blame her? But we would have made good pioneers in the new life because neither one of us could tolerate the old. Someday women will admit the truth, will refuse to accept it, and then they will be my best recruits.

Oh, one last thing she said. She held my hand for a while after shaking hands goodbye. “When you get up there in Virginia,” she told me, “you’ll find a fallen-down house but a small solid-two-hundred-year-old barn. One side is a corn crib and a tack room with a loft. It would make a lovely cozy place to live in the winter and big enough for three.” Christ, do you think this is another woman trying to fix me up in a pigeonnier? Why is it that shelters for animals now seem more habitable than ordinary houses? Hm. A done-over corn crib. But she said big enough for three. I had the feeling that if she could take her revenge, shoot enough men to even the score, not only for herself but for the bad trick played on her and her sisters by God or biology or evolution or whatever, she then might settle down with me in a barn, and we could hold each other as lovers should do, cling to each other like children, while Siobhan frolicked in the loft. Do you think she’ll come?

You look at me strangely. I don’t think I ever thanked you for listening to me. You know that I could not have told anyone else. Yes, I’m quite all right now. No, no confession forthcoming. Father, as you well know. But there is one thing … There is a coldness … You know the feeling of numbness and coldness, no, not a feeling, but a lack of feeling, that I spoke of during the events at Belle Isle? I told you it might have been the effect of the hurricane, the low pressure, methane, whatever. But I still feel it. That is, today, I don’t feel it. I don’t feel anything — except a slight curiosity about walking down that street out there. What do you think of it, that there is a certain coldness… Do you feel it?

The truth is that during all the terrible events that night at Belle Isle, I felt nothing at all. Nothing good, nothing bad, not even a sense of discovery. I feel nothing now except a certain coldness.

I feel so cold. Percival.

Tell me the truth. Is everyone cold now or is it only I?

What? You remind me that I said in the beginning that there was something I wanted to ask you. Ah yes. Well, it doesn’t seem important now. Because there is no answer to the question. The question? Very well. The question is: Why did I discover nothing at the heart of evil? There was no “secret” after all, no discovery, no flickering of interest, nothing at all. not even any evil. There was no sense of coming close to the “answer” as there had been when I discovered the stolen money in my father’s sock drawer. As I held that wretched Jacoby by the throat, I felt nothing except the itch of fiberglass particles under my collar. So I have nothing to ask you after all because there is no answer. There is no question. There is no unholy grail just as there was no Holy Grail.