Howard Jacobson: The Very Model Of A Man

Wasn’t that what we all wanted, from the first boy to the Only God — to be there when the woman howled?

You will not say anything and you will not go anywhere, my father told me. You will wait here until I come for you. I have spoken.

The rope of patience was running out. Listen to it. I have spoken.

The spot he chose for my confinement was sandy, rocky, barren, enjoying the shade of one solitary gasping tree that had not been there a fortnight earlier. Already it was dying — its light stolen by epiphytes, its heart gnawed at by termites. Even here, where there was nothing to envy, enviousness was at its labours.

I was just close enough to hear my mother at hers. Far enough not to see or spoil. A pretty torment they had devised for me. And still my father wasn’t satisfied. Sit, he said. And when I sat he bore down on me, his full weight pressing on my shoulders, as though he meant to plant me in the ground.

If I grow here the termites will get to work on my heart, I said.

He looked at me, trying to read my thoughts, then saw something in my eyes for which he had no name but which he must have felt he could not trust. I will have to tie you, he said.

I stopped myself from saying, the word is tether. But once the loop had gone around my neck I did say, first a rabbit, now a goat.

He raised his hand, but this time it was only to run his fingers through his own hair. He had, after all, a christening to attend. It’ll get worse than that, he said. Next time it will be man.

I watched him go, his strong squat body uncertain of its purpose; his back, built for resolution, for taking the stress of voluptuousness and conscience, slack with inutility. By his sides his fists, the twin spheres of his moral life, hung like empty sleeves, neither closed nor open.

I cursed him for the pity he cost me. Then, because I knew — although there was no standard for these things, no precedents yet, no jurisprudence of the family — that it could not be good for a son to curse or pity his father, I fell to pitying myself and cursing the disheartened tree to which I’d been secured. Hardwood, ironwood, wallow — no, more will… willow, weeping willow, box, bay, pine, Judas.

Judas.

My mother had usurped the day. All naming rights belonged to her. Except that the category was no longer fish but pain.

I sat, truly at the end of my tether, a small bundle of chafing reproaches, listening scornfully to her limited vocabulary. Oh! Aah! Oufff! Oufff! Aah! Oh! Not only were the sounds insufficiently distinct from one another to contribute to any useful lexicon of agony, they were also not to be distinguished, in accent, in cadence, in sequence, in predictability, from those I had learnt to associate with another category altogether — ecstasy.

Oh! Aah! Oufff! Oufff! Aah! Oh! Many a stewed and sweat-soaked night, under a bilious yellow moon, I had counted her breathings, exhilarated by my exclusion, but transported still more by the knowledge I possessed like marrow in my bones, that somewhere on the other side of that stricken moon, shaken by an extraneity immeasurably greater than my own, the Lord God Almighty, the volcanic Yahweh Himself, lay slumped at the pedestal to His single throne, His airless robes wound and wound again around His all, all-seeing eyes; His potter’s hands pressed vainly flat against His all, all-hearing ears; a livid, heaving inflammation — the colour of fleshly covetousness — swelling those lips that had shaped the first creating Word.

Morality is another name for spite. It was His idea that every delight my mother had taken in begetting she would pay for, gasp for gasp, in the sorrow of delivery. In your ends shall be your beginnings. The mind of a moralist rejoices in the orderly concept of poetic justice. Without the poetry, where would be the justice? But making the punishment fit the crime is only the half of it; whoever would savour to the last drop the sweets of retribution must understand that the crime already is the punishment.

My mother’s pain, then, might have seemed to mimic her former joy; but it was also in the order of things — the only order conceivable to a Mind obsessively symmetrical — that her joy should have no other language in which to express itself but that of pain. She groaned in the bringing forth because she had groaned in the conception; and she groaned in the conception in anticipation of the bringing forth. In this way, from the start, was suffering levied, like a tax payable in advance, on pleasure.

He — HE would have recanted, for this second delivery, had He been able. My birth had satisfied the greater part of His unstable wrath. His jealousy was less vengeful now, more diluted, more tristful. Even He needed a rest from violent oscillation. Now a blessing, now a curse. Now a covenant, now a dispossession. The ordinances of moral rule jangled His nerves, upset His stomach. He, too, would have liked quiet. The company of relations. He wanted to hold the baby. The new baby. But He could not undo His own logic: ‘I will greatly multiply thy sorrow, and thy desire shall be to thy husband; thy desire shall be to thy husband, therefore will I greatly multiply thy sorrow.’

And so we each bellowed. Oh! Aah! Oufff! Oufff!

Until finally, a cry weaker and yet more insistent than all the rest silenced us one by one, and alone prevailed.

I strained my hearing. Pulled at the goat-lead, desperate to gain whatever ground I could, for even half a foot’s-length might have been enough to give me the one clue I needed to the identity, the sex, the size, the colour and the conformation of what my mother had gasped forth. There is satisfaction to be taken in near-choking, and I took it; luxuriating in a nausea of which I could at least explain the cause.

As the sun set, a suffusion of sugary benign pinks bedaubed the heavens. God’s smile. Then a soft humming, like distant wings beating — a sort of crooning of the spheres. God’s blessing.

Although, ever since I can remember, I have thrown myself into the arms of sleep more willingly than I have submitted to any alternative embrace, and to this day suffer something close to derangement if I am forced for long to go without her, I did willingly go without her that night, so essential was it to my well-being, or rather to my ill-being, not to miss a single intake of live breath, a solitary endearment, the merest exhalation of a contentment that contained not me. Not for a second did my eyelids droop. I pulled, choked, burned and listened. The night itself held no terrors that could distract me, even though the termites rose against me, and the sand flicked and writhed beneath my knees and elbows, and everywhere in the moon-silvered blackness things blundered up from dew and dirt, so confounded by their function that they devoured their own flesh, consuming themselves out of existence no sooner than they’d entered it.

In the morning my father came for me. I knew that he too had gone without sleep because not once in the night had I heard the accustomed anguish of his suffocation in the mud of nightmare. He did not exactly look tired — although his eyes were bruised, ringed purple, bearing the rotation marks of his own knuckles — more… I suppose the only word is sacred, washed with wonders. Marvel-fatigued.

He untied me — untethered me — with the exaggerated delicacy he usually reserved for magic. I was eggshell and his hands were swansdown. I was the dried pea and his fingers — watch, everybody! — the cones you had to find me under. To say that he untied me belittles his tenderness and dexterity. He spirited me from that tree.

When he saw the marks around my throat where I had struggled, relishing failure, against my captivity, his cheeks turned the same colour the evening sky had been. Joy and pain identical in sound; now rejoicing and remorse identical in pigmentation. We are unsubtly made. We lack the strings to pluck the tunes we hear. I would have liked my father unambiguously contrite that morning, I would have welcomed a symphony of sorrow from him, but the emotion that rattled the phlegm in his chest could have been any one of the four or five with which he’d made himself familiar. After the delicacy he could as easily have thrust my head under water again.