John Banville: Eclipse

She must be of Minoan origin, the Virgin; even her colours, cobalt and lime-white, suggest the Isles of Greece. Mary as Pasiphaë, serpent in hand and her conical bare breasts on show, there is a thought to frighten the priests.

I have remained a devotee of the goddess, and she in turn has been attentive to me, in the various forms in which she has been manifest in my life. First of course there was my mother. She tried to but could not understand me, her changeling. She was a querulous, distracted person, given to worries and vague agitations, always labouring under unspecified grievances, always waiting, it seemed, tight-lipped and patiently sorrowing, for a general apology from the world. She was afraid of everything, of being late and of being too early, of draughts and of stuffiness, of germs and crowds and accidents and neighbours, of being knocked down in the street by a stranger and robbed. When my father died she took to widowhood as if it were the natural state for which her life with him had been merely a long and heartsore preparation. They had not been happy; happiness had not been part of life’s guarded promise to them. They did not quarrel, I think they were not intimate enough for that. My mother was voluble, at times to the point of hysteria, while my father kept silence, and so they struck a violent equilibrium. After he died, or finished fading—his physical demise was only the official end of a slow dissolution, like the full stop the doctor stabbed into his death certificate that day, leaving a shiny blot—she in her turn began gradually to fall silent. Her voice itself turned thin and papery, with a whining cadence, like that of one left standing in the dust of the road, watching the carriage wheels roll away, with a sentence half finished and no one left to finish it for. All her dealings with me then became a kind of ceaseless pleading, by turns piteous and angry. What she wanted was for me to explain myself to her, to account for what I was, and why I differed so from her. It was as if she believed she could through me somehow solve the riddle of her own life and of the things that had happened to her, and of the so many more things that had not. But I could not help her, I was not the one to take her and lead her back along that shadowed pathway past the shut gates guarding all the unspent riches of what she might have been. The end for her was bafflement and furious refusal, as she clung to the posts of the last gate, the one that had finally opened for her, bracing her feet against the threshold, until the gateman came and prised her fingers loose and brought her onward finally, into the dark place. No, I could not help her. I did not even weep at the graveside; I think I was thinking of something else. There is in me, deep down, as there must be in everyone—at least, I hope there is, for I would not wish to be alone in this—a part that does not care for anything other than itself. I could lose everything and everyone and that pilot light would still be burning at my centre, that steady flame that nothing will quench, until the final quenching.

I clearly recall the day I first became truly aware of myself, I mean of myself as something that everything else was not. As a boy I liked best those dead intervals of the year when one season had ended and the next had not yet begun, and all was grey and hushed and still, and out of the stillness and the hush something would seem to approach me, some small, soft, tentative thing, and offer itself to my attention. This day of which I speak I was walking along the main street of the town. It was November, or March, not cold, but neutral. From a lowering sky fine rain was falling, so fine as to be hardly felt. It was morning, and the housewives were out, with their shopping bags and headscarves. A questing dog trotted busily past me looking neither to right nor left, following a straight line drawn invisibly on the pavement. There was a smell of smoke and butcher’s meat, and a brackish smell of the sea, and, as always in the town in those days, the faint sweet stench of pig-swill. The open doorway of a hardware shop breathed brownly at me as I went past. Taking in all this, I experienced something to which the only name I could give was happiness, although it was not happiness, it was more and less than happiness. What had occurred? What in that commonplace scene before me, the ordinary sights and sounds and smells of the town, had made this unexpected thing, whatever it was, burgeon suddenly inside me like the possibility of an answer to all the nameless yearnings of my life? Everything was the same now as it had been before, the housewives, that busy dog, the same, and yet in some way transfigured. Along with the happiness went a feeling of anxiety. It was as if I were carrying some frail vessel that it was my task to protect, like the boy in the story told to us in religious class who carried the Host through the licentious streets of ancient Rome hidden inside his tunic; in my case, however, it seemed I was myself the precious vessel. Yes, that was it, it was /that was happening here. I did not know exactly what this meant, but surely, I told myself, surely it must mean something. And so I went on, in happy puzzlement, under the small rain, bearing the mystery of myself in my heart.

Was it that same phial of precious ichor, still inside me, that spilled in the cinema that afternoon, and that I carry in me yet, and that yet will overflow at the slightest movement, the slightest mis-beat of my heart?

I passed the years of my youth practising for the stage. I would prowl the back roads of the town, always alone, playing out solitary dramas of struggle and triumph in which I spoke all the parts, even of the vanquished and the slain. I would be anyone but myself. Thus it continued year on year, the intense, unending rehearsal. But what was it I was rehearsing for? When I searched inside myself I found nothing finished, only a permanent potential, a waiting to go on. At the site of what was supposed to be my self was only a vacancy, an ecstatic hollow. And things rushed into this vacuum where the self should be. Women, for instance. They fell into me, thinking to fill me with all they had to give. It was not simply that I was an actor and therefore supposedly lacking an essential part of personality; I was a challenge to them, to their urge to create, to make life. I am afraid they did not succeed, with me.

Lydia had seemed the one capable of concentrating sufficient attention on me to make me shine out into the world with a flickering intensity such that even I might believe I was real. When I first encountered her she lived in a hotel. I mean, her family home was a hotel. That summer, more than half my lifetime ago now, I would see her almost every day as she came and went through the revolving glass doors of the Halcyon, got up in outlandish confections of cheesecloth and velvet and beads. She wore her black hair very straight, in the soulful style of the day, the bold silver streak in it less pronounced than it would be in later years but still striking. She became an object of keen speculation for me. I had a room in a rotting tenement in one of those cobbled canyons off the river, where at dawn the drays let loose from the brewery gates woke me with the thunder of apocalyptic hoofs, and the nights were permeated with the sickly sweet smell of roasting malt. Loitering along the embankment I watched for Lydia by the hour, in the gritty airlessness of the summer city. She was an exotic, a daughter of the desert. She walked with a sort of sulky swing, rolling her shoulders a little, always with her head down, as if she were meticulously retracing her steps to somewhere or something momentous. When she pushed through the hotel door the revolving glass panels threw off a splintered multiple image of her before she disappeared into the peopled dimness of the lobby. I made up lives for her. She was foreign, of course, the runaway daughter of an aristocratic family of fabulous pedigree; she was a rich man’s former mistress, in hiding from his agents here in this backwater; certainly, she must have something in her past, I was convinced of it, some loss, some secret burden, some crime, even. When by chance I was introduced to her at an opening night—she was a great one for the theatre, in those days, and seemed to go to every production that was put on, with undiscriminating enthusiasm—I experienced an inevitable jolt of disappointment, as of something subsiding with a crunch under my diaphragm. Just another girl, after all.