John Banville - Eclipse

Anyway, as I was saying, today in town I was in a telephone box, calling Lydia, when I spotted Quirke coming out of the solicitor’s office where he works—although the word is, I am sure, overly strong for what he does in the way of earning a living. He was carrying a clutch of manila envelopes under his arm, and wore an aspect of sullen duty. “There’s Quirke,” I said into the phone, in one of my lapses into the inconsequential that Lydia finds so irritating. It was the first time we had talked since I disconnected the telephone in the house, and it felt strange. There was the distance between us—she might have been speaking from the dark side of the moon—yet more marked was the unshakeable sensation I had that it was not really she on the line, but a recording, or even a mechanically generated imitation of her voice. Have I sunk so far into myself that the living should sound like automata? The booth smelled strongly of urine and crushed cigarette ends, and the sun was hot on the glass. I had telephoned to enquire as to Cass’s whereabouts. Although Cass is what I must think of as a grown woman—she is twenty-two, or is it twenty-three? the calendar is a little indistinct, from where I am positioned at present—part of my peace of mind depends on always knowing at least approximately where she is. My peace of mind, that’s a good one. The last I knew of her she was doing research of an unspecified and no doubt arcane—not to say, hare-brained—nature in some unpronounceable declivity of the Low Countries; now, it seems, she is in Italy. “I had a peculiar call from her,” Lydia was saying, as if a call from Cass could be anything other than peculiar. I asked if she was all right. It was what we used to ask each other in the old days, with an unstillable, apprehensive tremor: Is she all right? Lydia’s brief silence on the line was the equivalent of a shrug. For a moment we said nothing, then I began to describe Quirke’s odd, small-footed lope—how daintily he moves, for one so large and top-heavy—and Lydia became angry, and her voice thickened.

“Why are you doing this to me?” she almost wailed.

“Doing what?” I asked, and immediately, without another word, she hung up. I put in more coins and began to dial the number again, but stopped; what more was there to say?—what had there been to say in the first place?

Quirke had not seen me there behind the grimed glass of the booth, crouched over the receiver in the attitude of a man nursing a toothache, and I decided to follow him. But I should not say that I decided. I never do set out wholly consciously to stalk anyone. Rather, I will find myself already on the way, absent-mindedly, as it were, half thinking of something else, yet with my… my victim, I was about to say, firmly fixed in view. It was a morning of warm wind and heavy sunlight. Quirke was going along on the shady side of the street and almost at once I nearly lost him, when he ducked into a post office, but there was no mistaking that broad stooped back and its following down-at-heel grey shoe and grubby white sock. I dawdled at the window of a chemist’s shop opposite, waiting for him. How hard it is, as I the stalker know from long experience, to concentrate on a reflection in a shop window without letting one’s attention drift to the wares on offer, however less solid they may seem than the fleeting, burnished world mirrored on the surface of the glass behind which they stand in uneasy display. Distracted by posters of bathing beauties advertising sun creams, and in particular a coy arrangement of gleaming steel pincers designed, I believe, for castrating calves, I almost missed Quirke’s reappearance. Empty-handed now, he bustled off with accelerated step and turned a corner on to the quays. I hurried across the road, making a delivery boy on a bike swerve and swear, but when I rounded the corner there was no sign of Quirke. I stood and surveyed the scene with a narrowed eye, searching for a sign of him among wheeling gulls, those three rusted trawlers, a bronze statue pointing with vague urgency out to sea. When a stalkee vanishes like this the uncanniness of ordinary things is intensified; a telltale gap opens in the world, like the chink of blue evening sky the Chinaman in the fable spots between the magic city and the hill on which it is supposed to be standing. Then I noticed the pub, wedged into a corner between a fish shop and the gate of a motor car repair yard.

It was an old-style premises, the nicotine-brown varnish on the door and window sills combed and whorled to give the illusion of wood grain, and the window painted inside an opaque sepia shade to a filigreed six inches of the top. The place had somehow the mark of Quirke about it. I went in, stumbling on the worn threshold. The place was empty, the bar untended. In an ashtray on the counter a forgotten cigarette was smoking itself in surreptitious haste, sending up a quick straight plume of blue smoke. On a shelf an old-fashioned wireless muttered. Behind the usual pub smells there was a mingled whiff of machine oil and brine from the next-door premises on either side. I heard from somewhere in the shadowed rear a lavatory flushing and a rickety door opening with a scrape, and Quirke came shambling forward, hitching up the waistband of his trousers and running a quick finger down the flies. I turned aside hastily, but I need not have bothered, for he did not even glance at me, but walked straight past and out the door with a self-forgetting look, squinting into the light.

I am still wondering which of the world’s secret administrators it was who left that cigarette burning on the bar.

In the minute that I had been in the pub the morning had clouded over. A great grey bank of cumulus fringed in silver hung above the sea, moving landward with menacing intent. Quirke had crossed to the wooden quay and was walking along with what seemed a blundering step, like that of a man purblinded by tears. Or was he tipsy, I wondered? Surely he had not been long enough in the pub to drink himself drunk. Yet as I followed along behind him I could not rid myself of the notion that he was somehow incapacitated, in some great distress. All at once I was seized on violently by the memory of a dream that I dreamed one recent night, and that I had forgotten, until now. In the dream I was a torturer, a professional of long experience, skilled in the art of pain, whom people came to—tyrants, spy-catchers, brigand chiefs—to hire my unique services, when their own efforts and those of their most enthusiastic henchmen had all failed. My current victim was a man of great presence, of great resolve and assurance, a burly, bearded fellow, the kind of high-toned hero I used to be cast to play in the latter years of my career, when I was judged to have attained a grizzled majesty of bearing. I do not know who he was supposed to be, nor did I know him in the dream; seemingly it was a condition of my professionalism not to know the identity or the supposed crimes of those on whom I was called to work my persuasive art. The details of my methods were vague; I employed no tools, no tongs or prods or burning-irons, but was myself the implement of torture. I would grasp my victim in some special way and crush him slowly until his bones buckled and his internal organs collapsed. I was irresistible, not to be withstood; all succumbed, sooner or later, under my terrible ministrations. All, that is, except this bearded hero, who was defeating me simply by not paying me sufficient attention, by not acknowledging me. Oh, he was in agony, all right, I was inflicting the most terrible torments on him, masterpieces of pain that made him writhe and shudder and grind his teeth until they creaked, but it was as if his sufferings were his own, were generated out of himself, and that it was himself and not I that he must resist, his own will and vigour and unrelenting force. I might not have been part of the process at all. I could feel the heat of his flesh, could smell the fetor of his anguish. He strained away from me, lifting his face to the smoke-blackened ceiling of the dungeon, where a fitful light flickered; he cried out, he whimpered; sweat dripped from his beard, his eyeballs bled. Never had the person I was in the dream experienced so strongly the erotic intimacy that binds the torturer to his victim, yet never had I been so thoroughly shut out from my subject’s pain. I was not there—simply, for him I was not there, and so, despite the intensity, despite the passion, one might say, of my presence in the midst of his agony, somehow I was absent for myself as well, absent, that is to say, from myself.