John Banville - Nightspawn

‘It will be very sad about Julian.’

I did not reply to what seems to have been a question. He glanced at me, with the faintest touch of reproof.

‘Do you not think it will be very sad, Mr White?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t heard anything. I don’t know him all that well.’

‘Oh. I thought you were an old friend.’

‘No.’

‘Do you know what I’m talking about?’

‘No.’

‘You have heard nothing about his factories?’

‘No.’

‘I wish you would not lie to me, Mr White. There is no need.’

‘No.’

There came a silence then, and we listened to the metallic chorus of the cicadas. I put my hand to the top of my head. My hair was hot to the touch. I had a strange, not unpleasant floating sensation, as though I were surrounded by thick warm fluid. The air was like placenta. To go on saying no, that lovely little moan, seemed enough to separate me from anything and everything of import. A sound came from the house, the slamming of a door, and Aristotle turned and peered through the windows which we had left standing open. No one appeared there, and, with a little sigh, he turned back again, and yawned.

‘Chill in the air,’ he said.

I lit a cigarette. As I released the first breath of smoke, I felt Aristotle’s eyes upon me hungrily.

‘Do you want one?’

‘I am forbidden to smoke now.’

There was a world of woe in his voice. I tried to blow the smoke away from him, but a sadistic breeze insisted on carrying it to his nose. He coughed, and mumbled,

‘What was I saying? Ah yes. A whale.’

‘Pardon?’

He turned to me suddenly, his hands clutching his knees.

‘I think I will take a cigarette, Mr White.’

He lit it with a trembling fist, and sucked greedily at the gay coils of smoke. He smiled. His mouth smiled.

‘The whale,’ he said. ‘I once read somewhere that whales are really very gentle animals. Frail even, in their way. It’s strange, for such an enormous beast, although I don’t see why. Perhaps their size … I don’t know. The sharks could kill them, it seems, but the whales act as bait. Shoals of tiny fishes swim in their wake, and the sharks feed on them. So, with the peculiar wisdom of unthinking things, they know better than to take one large meal in place of a constant promise of sufficiency.’

He paused, seemingly pleased with the nice turn of that last sentence. Then he frowned, and went on,

‘I wonder if that’s true? I really think I must have read it incorrectly. It sounds most improbable, don’t you think, sharks being such incredibly savage creatures?’

I said,

‘No.’

Aristotle joined his fingers at their tips and touched them to his chin. He began to rock slowly backward and forward on the chair. The bolts creaked.

‘He is quite brilliant, you know, but he has this ridiculous obsession with revolution.’

‘Colonel.’

‘Yes?’

‘It’s very hot. I wish you’d —’

‘Come to the point?’

‘Yes.’

Regretfully he drew the last wisp of smoke from the butt of the cigarette. The nicotine seemed to have revived in him some interest in the aspects of the world outside his eyes. He looked about his property, decaying though it was, with a hint of satisfaction. He asked,

‘Do you think that it is possible to achieve anything through armed uprisings? I mean frankly, do you think it is?’

A figure came out through the windows, a short, dapper little man in an army uniform. His pigeon-chest flashed with bright bits of metal. Aristotle stood up, and they stood at attention, their hands twitching at their sides. But they did not salute, and turned away from each other in anger and confusion. Aristotle said,

‘This is Colonel Panagoulis.’

Panagoulis looked at me, and his neck sank into the folds of his khaki collar. He had the look of an irritable tortoise. I ran my tongue across my lower lip.

‘I can’t stand this heat,’ Panagoulis snapped, and turned and strode back into the house. Aristotle sat down. His fingers twitched. He said,

‘I was at the end of my career before I realized that I was not suited to the army. A wasted life. It is astonishing.’

He went to the edge of the pool, and, taking up a long pole, to the end of which there was tied a net, for trapping leaves, he deftly scooped up the fast-failing lizard, and reunited it to its native soil. He watched it with tenderness as it crawled away into the grass.

‘Amazing creatures,’ he said. ‘I always wanted to study them.’

He sighed, and peered across the garden with his eyes narrowed. He was drifting away from me.

‘It’s very hot,’ I said.

‘Is it? I don’t feel it very much now.’

He looked at his liver-spotted arms.

‘I’m sixty-two,’ he said.

Panagoulis came out on the verandah.

‘He’s here,’ he called, and disappeared once again.

‘Who?’ Aristotle asked, turning, and, seeing the verandah empty, he threw up his hands and swore. And then he suddenly turned to me, fixed me with a keen look, and said briskly,

‘Take my advice, Mr White, and leave this country.’

‘Why?’

‘Look at me, Mr White. Look at Panagoulis. The gods are dead. There is nothing left for people like you.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

But his speech had taxed him beyond weariness. He sat now, crouched and old, his eyelids lightly closed. He lifted a hand in a tired gesture of dismissal. I turned away. The windows yawned silently, and as I passed through them it seemed that huge jaws with teeth might come crashing down on me from the ceiling.

And when I returned to the shop, Rabin was standing over a pimply pale young man from the telephone company, who was busily, if clumsily, extracting from the wall that black buzzing tooth which had so pained the old man. Now who will tell me that this world is sane?

There follows, until the next evening, a curious hollow silence in my memory. The events of those hours seem to have slipped down into some hidden fissure of time. Perhaps there were no events. It is quite possible. Something does remain, however, like the dark blur of an unidentifiable though vaguely unsettling object trapped inside a block of ice. It is the recollection of the blank and dispersed mood of that time, like the animal sense which those in shock must retain of the forcibly forgotten blood and twisted metal of the disaster. There was no carnage or death in my case, I think, but only that soundless, fascinated horror one feels when the top step of the stairs proves nonexistent, and the foot descends into an empty eternity of darkness. Something was flying violently out of my hands, and I could only watch it fall, and wait for it to smash at my feet. I can do no better than these vague suggestions, this mixed bag of metaphors. Perhaps it was my life which was beginning to fly from my grasp.

I climbed the hill in the dark, with the lights of the city burning behind me, and the stars burning in the sky. It was a soft balmy night, with only the voices of the trees stirring the silence. Fire in the western sky now and then illuminated a serrated horizon, a stark tree, a bit of roof. Gleaming limousines crouched in their spoor on the road outside the house. Faint music sounded distantly. I was nervous, all brushed and shaved, and bundled into the constricting second skin of a suit. The trap door in the gate was opened, dropping a neat square of light at my feet, and an elderly Arab in a flowing white robe asked softly,

‘Yes?’

‘Ben White.’

‘Come in, Sair,’ he murmured, and, throwing back the loose sleeve of his robe, he offered me the garden. As I stepped past him I asked,