John Banville - Eclipse

When Lydia and I were first married we lived in a cavernous third-floor flat in a crumbling Georgian terrace, with a bathroom up a short flight of stairs, through the small high window of which, if I craned, I could see down into the bedroom of a flat in the house next door, where often of a morning, when the weather was clement, I would glimpse a naked girl getting herself ready for her day. Through a whole spring and summer I watched for her there each morning, one knee pressed tremblingly on the lavatory seat and my tortoise neck straining; I might have been an Attic shepherd and she a nymph at her toilet. She was not particularly pretty: red-haired, I remember, rather thick in the waist, and with an unhealthy pallor. Yet she fascinated me. She was not aware of being spied on, and so she was—what shall I say?—free. I had never before witnessed such purity of gesture. All her actions—brushing her hair, pulling on her pants, fastening a clasp behind her back—had an economy that was beyond mere physical adroitness. This was a kind of art, at once primitive and highly developed. Nothing was wasted, not the lift of a hand, the turn of a shoulder; nothing was for show. Without knowing, in perfect self-absorption, she achieved at the start of each day there in her mean room an apotheosis of grace and suavity. The unadorned grave beauty of her movements was, it pained the performer in me to acknowledge, inimitable: even if I spent a lifetime in rehearsal I could not hope to aspire to the thoughtless elegance of this girl’s most trivial gesture. Of course, all was dependent precisely on there being no thought attached to what she was doing, no awareness. One glimpse of my eager eye at the bathroom window, watching her, and she would have scrambled to hide her nakedness with all the grace of a collapsing deck chair or, worse, would have slipped into the travesty of self-conscious display. Innocent of being watched, she was naked; aware of my eye on her, she would have turned into a nude. What was most intensely striking, I think, was her lack of expression. Her face was an utter blank, an almost featureless mask, such that if I had encountered her in the street—which I am sure I must have, often—I would not have recognised her.

It is this forgetfulness, this loss of crearurely attendance, that I find fascinating. In watching someone who is unaware of being watched one glimpses a state of being that is beyond, or behind, what we think of as the human; it is to behold, however ungrasp-ably, the unmasked self itself. The ones I fixed on to trail about the streets were never the freaks, the cripples or dwarves, the amputees, the unfortunates with limps or squints or port-wine stains; or if I did choose some such afflicted wretch, it was not his affliction that drew me but what in him was utterly commonplace and drab. In my table of types, beauty does not make eligible nor ugliness disqualify. Indeed, ugliness and beauty are not categories that apply here—my questing gaze makes no aesthetic measurements. I am a specialist, with a specialist’s dispassion, like a surgeon, say, to whose diagnostic eye a girl’s budding breasts or an old man’s sagging paps are objects of equal interest, equal indifference. Nor would I bother with the blind, as might be expected of a stalker as timid as I am, as leery of notice and challenge. Despite his blank or downcast gaze, the blind man is always more alert than the sighted one—more watchful, even, one might say—unable for an instant to relax his awareness of the self as it negotiates its fastidious way through this menacing, many-angled world.

Among my favourite quarries were the derelicts, the tramps and reeling winos, of whom we have always boasted a thriving community. I knew them all, the fat fellow in the knitted tricolour cap, the one with the look of an anguished ascetic whose left hand was a permanently outstretched begging bowl, the sauntering flâneurs with crusted bare feet, the raging tinker-women, the drunkards spouting obscenities or scraps of Latin verse. This is true theatre of the streets, and they its strolling players. What fascinated me was the distance between what they were now and what they must once have been. I tried to imagine them as babes in arms, or toddling about the floor of some loud tenement or sequestered cottage, watched over by fond eyes, borne up by loving hands. For they had to have been young once, in a past that must seem to them now as far off and impossibly radiant as the dawn of the world.

Apart from their intrinsic interest as a species, I favoured outcasts because, being outcasts, they were not liable suddenly to elude me by disappearing into a smart boutique, or turning in at a suburban garden gate, frowningly fishing for a key. We had the freedom of the streets, they and I, and for hours I would follow after them—an actor, especially in his early years, has a lot of time on his hands—along the dreamy pavements, through the faintly sinister orderliness of public parks, as the afternoons grew loud with the clamour of paroled schoolchildren, and the broad strips of sky above us turned mussel-shell blue, and the evening traffic started up, scurrying in herds through the dusk, hunched and bleating. Along with the peculiar pleasure I derive from this furtive hobby goes a certain melancholy, due to what I think of as the Uncertainty Principle. You see, as long as I only watch them without their knowing, I am in some sense intimately in touch with them, they are in some sense mine, whereas if they were to become aware of me dogging their steps, that which in them is of interest to me—their lack of awareness, their freedom from self-consciousness, their wonderful, vacant ease—would instantly vanish. I may observe, but not touch.

One day one of them confronted me. It was a shock. He was a drinker, a rough, vigorous fellow of about my own age, with a bristling rufous jaw and the stricken eyes of a saint in quest of martyrdom. It was a raw day in March, but I stuck with him. He favoured the quays, I do not know why, for there was a cutting wind from the river. I skulked behind him with my collar turned up, while he went along at a stumbling swagger, his coat-tails billowing and his filthy shirt collar open—do they somehow develop an immunity to the cold? In a pocket of his coat was stowed a large fat bottle, wrapped in a brown-paper bag, the neck exposed. At every dozen paces or so he would stop and with a dramatic sweep bring out the bottle, still in its bag, and take a long slug, rocking back on his heels, his throat working in coital spasms as he swallowed. These mighty quaffings had no discernible effect on him, except perhaps to lend a momentary faltering jerkiness to his stride. We had been promenading like this for a good half-hour, down one side of the quays and up the other—he seemed to have his beat marked out in his head—and I was ready to abandon him, for it was apparent he was going nowhere, when at one of the bridges he swerved aside on to the footway, and when I hastened to catch up I found myself abruptly face to face with him. He had turned back and stopped, and was standing with a steadying hand pressed on the parapet, head lifted and mouth sternly set, regarding me with a challenging glare. I experienced a thrill of alarm—I felt like a schoolboy surprised in a prank—and looked about hurriedly for a way of escape. Yet although the path was wide, and I could easily have sidestepped him, I did not. He continued to look at me out of those imperiously questioning, agonised eyes. I do not know what he expected of me. I was scandalised, it is the only word, to be thus accosted by a quarry, yet partly I was excited, too, and partly—odd though the word will seem—flattered, as one would be flattered to win the attention of some fierce creature of the wild. A blast of wind made the flap of his coat crack like a flag and he gave himself a shuddery shake. I dithered. Passers-by were glancing at us with curiosity and disapproval, suspecting the nature of the commerce they imagined we were engaged in. I reached fumblingly into my pocket and found a banknote and offered it to him. He looked at the money with surprise and even, I thought, a touch of umbrage. I persisted, and even went so far as to press the note into his hot and mottled hand. His demeanour now turned positively patronising; he had the large, half-smiling, half-surprised look of an opponent into whose power I had clumsily allowed myself to fall. I might have spoken, but what would I have said? I stepped past him quickly and hurried on, across the bridge, without daring to look back. I thought I heard him say something, call out something, but still I did not turn. My heart was racing. On the other side of the bridge I slowed my steps. I was badly shaken, I can tell you. Despite the fellow’s fierce appearance there had been something cloyingly intimate in the encounter, something from which my mind’s eye insisted on averting its gaze. Rules had been broken, a barrier had been transgressed, an interdiction breached. I had been forced to experience a human moment, and now I was confused, and did not know what to think. Strange bright fragments of lost possibilities flashed about in my mind. I regretted not having asked the fellow’s name. I regretted not telling him mine. I wondered, with a pang that startled me, if I would ever come across him again. But what did I imagine I would do, if he were to step out boldly into my path on some other bridge, on some other day, and challenge me?