Howard Jacobson - The Very Model Of A Man

‘What would you have me put into your ear?’ he asks.

She is distressed that he needs her to tell him. ‘Anything,’ she says, ‘and everything. Your life story. Your laughter. Your terrors. Your seed.’

He thinks about it. ‘Why would you want to hear my seed?’

‘It is not a matter,’ she says, ‘of what I want.’

Wants. Wants. He looks without interest into the unshapen swirls of skin and membrane. ‘What pleasure or comfort can it be to me,’ he asks, ‘to confuse an organ of perception with an organ of generation?’

She turns her rejected ear from him, letting her hair once again conceal it. ‘In Babel,’ she says, ‘there is a saying that there can never be too many openings to a woman’s body.’

‘I cannot decide,’ he replies, ‘whether that is an expression of extraordinary refinement of mind or extraordinary literalness.’

She meets his glance, in which there is not the faintest play of mirth, and without warning revolves her eyes so as to make her pupils and irises quite vanish, in their place only the terrible unflickering milky screens of unsightedness. As he does not care for openings, she can just as soon close down every ingress of sensation. ‘Behold, I am blind for you,’ her action says, except that she would have him know that she can be mute for him too.

He feels giddy, and would take to a couch were he not already stretched out on one. He cannot look into the shocking lactescence of her unseeing stare. It reminds him of how his father, to entertain or frighten him, would put blanched pebbles into the sockets of his eyes; but more, of how his mother turned up her eyes in shy, self-effacing supplication to the All Seeing. Blind, blind, every woman in the hour of her adoration. Blind to reason. Blind to refusal. Blind to herself. As if any man, even the most epicurean in cruelty, could count this annihilation into chalky blankness a gift worth the receiving. For his part, he is unable to conceive of a single satisfaction to be found in the company of women — mothers, nurses, shuri, call them what you like — which does not insist, as a prerequisite to pleasure, on their appalled but unswerving stare. What a woman does not see him suffer keenly, he does not relish keenly. And, could he be certain of sensibility and squeamishness leaving his fingers — as once before, fighting blindness in his brother, he had felt them desert his whole body — he would reach under Silili’s unresisting lids, quivering like moths, and forcibly right her eyeballs.

Instead, imagining blood, he says, ‘Look at me.’

She sways, holding on to him with her long, spicy fingers. Entranced.

‘Come,’ he says, gently. ‘Come, Silili. Look at me.’

She finds her smile first, her Shinarite phosphorescence — ambiguous but not, of course, ironic — then her balance, and last of all, her sight.

‘There is nothing I cannot demand of you, then?’ he says.

‘Nothing.’ She is already half-blind again.

‘And nothing I cannot demand that you demand of me?’

She takes longer over this. But, ‘Nothing,’ is what she finally agrees.

‘In which case, look at me,’ he says. ‘You have seen a goat tethered to a stake?’

She nods, hesitantly, trying to remember what she knows. ‘I am skilled in the seven positions after the fashion of the ram,’ she says. ‘Is the goat similar?’

‘No, look at me,’ he says. He would like her to forget what she is skilled in. ‘Look at me. You have seen a tethered goat. You have about your waist a sash which will serve well as a tether. I am to be the goat. The bed-post can be the stake.’

She shakes her head, a slow shamed disbelieving movement, causing the little bells in her hair to ring funereally. ‘Is there some illness in you?’ she asks.

‘Didn’t they warn you about my horns and tail?’

She shakes another tinkling death-march out of her hair. ‘I have felt for your tail with my tongue,’ she says reproachfully — for her tongue has not stirred him — ‘and I know that you do not have one. But there is illness in you.’

‘And do you not cure illness?’

‘Not in the way you would have me cure it. I can be an empress for you. I can be a temple priestess or a goddess fashioned according to the theology of your choice. But I cannot be a farm-girl. In Babel, men who wish to enjoy the favours of a farm-girl visit a farm.’

‘I do not ask you to be a farm-girl. Only that you assist me to be a farm-animal.’

She leaps from him, retreating until her back is up against the furthest wall. She means to cover any unexpected direction, it seems, from which his words might penetrate her. She puts a hand to her distended ear and compresses her lips until her mouth is narrower than a key-hole. He fancies he can hear all her openings of pleasure — and he is sure he has not come close to discovering how many she possesses — shutting against him, one by one.

‘You are not a man,’ she says. ‘You do not take pride in a man’s prowess.’

He sighs. He has not asked for any of this. An hour before, he was alone, with only his thoughts to trouble him.

‘Why should pride in one’s prowess as a man,’ he says, taking care to excise all mockery from his voice, ‘exclude a desire, just once in a while, to suffer indignity as a beast? I mean no disrespect to the hospitality your city has shown me, but I do fear that you are slaves, here in Babel, to a most narrow interpretation of sensuality. Find access to a woman’s body in as many unexpected places as you like, empiercing — you will forgive me, Silili — is still empiercing. Introduce repetition into delight, and like any chore, it will weary. A city as grand and as various as this one ought to be better able to enjoy itself. But fixation on pleasure is hampering you. If you would permit me to import the altogether more subtle dissatisfactions of unpleasure, I wager you would find…’

But Silili does not wait to learn what she would find. With one last carillon of precious bells, and a pitiless jangle of copper moons, she flies from his presence, leaving behind her tabret, her set of golden mixing bowls and spatulas, her little jewel encrusted casket of unguents, balms and washing powders, her rosewood sewing box inlaid with ivory of walrus, her sacred promise never to abandon a male stranger to the excruciations of unappeased cravings, but not, alas, the silken sash with which, by tethering him to a bed-post, she might have helped a man who had raised his hand against his brother find respite from his humanity in the attitude of a stinking, ruminating goat.

Not wanting to betray her personal distress, nor, at this very witching hour, to be seen out of an occupation, Silili glides as soundlessly as is compatible with the instrumentalisation of her tailoring across the darkened, sleeping streets. Only Zilpah, brooding in the shadows of rearing temples, observes her leave.

You will recall that our modest family had grown.

Not counting Our (Supranatural) Father, who is infinite and indivisible and therefore never to be subject to enumeration, we were now four. Three plus one. Two plus me plus him. Her minus me plus them squared. However you do the sum you arrive at the same answer; which proves the inadequacy, to any job not merely mechanical, of mathematics. For we had grown by far more than the small addition we were increased by, and the entire architecture of our commonweal had been shaken and defaced to an extent that made a mockery of the paltry arithmetical difference between three and four.

As if the second fruit she bore had been the sun, my mother narrowed her eyes into two milky slits and became earth mystical, a sow-goddess sprouting udders (paps, teats, dugs — I named them all) sufficient to feed a tribe of Abels.