Howard Jacobson - The Very Model Of A Man

It didn’t matter how hard a skin his fingers grew, by the end of each day they were bleeding from the friction. He was covered in cuts and dirt, calcareous splinters having embedded themselves beneath his nails, in his ears, in his nostrils, in his scalp, in places unknown even to my mother. By nightfall the joints of his body were locked in a position from which they had not moved since morning.

My mother’s custom of bathing him began from this time, when he had to be carried, bawling and bloody, from his shells. Only her hands, lovingly lathering, could quieten him and make him flexible again and send him to sleep. But I could tell from the movement of his eyelids as I crouched over him, that he was still spinning in his dreams; and when I awoke in the morning, there he would be, up before any of us, already in the dirt, already rigid, already crying, with his carapaces whirring.

Had he been able to sustain this preoccupation beyond early childhood it might have been better for all of us. There was safety in his spinning. But although he was to remain withdrawn in temperament, capable at any time not just of feigning deafness but actually of becoming deaf when things were said which he preferred not to hear, Eve’s appreciation of his appearance awoke him at last to himself.

She had never been sparing in her praises of him. Even on those early bath nights when she gathered him up, kicking and giddy, there was always some preliminary rhetorical marvelling over his loveliness. Look — isn’t he beautiful! she would sing. Look how his skin shines. You can almost see yourself in him! Look how he sparkles in the dark, like a star. My little star!

He had resisted it all then. Fought against the coddling and the exhibiting. Not a good idea to be held up and shown like this, a sound instinct warned him, especially in the presence of a father whose labours went unappreciated and a brother who… sat up at night listening to heart-beats. But as he grew older he began to give in to the delicious sensation of exciting compliment. When my mother drew attention to the slender bow of his neck, or to the wheels of yellow hair that appeared to complete circles whenever he moved his head, it was as though she lit fires beneath his transparent skin. He didn’t flush; never once, not even in moments of crisis, did I see my brother, living, stained red. There was always white in his colouring, always something ghostly in his pigmentation; but you could see the flickering of warm lights, and you could smell distant burning, like sweetmeats roasting, the centres of self-esteem — the heart, the stomach — turning nicely on their spit.

What a lovely boy you are, my mother said to him, kissing him behind the ears or rubbing her nose into that place between the shoulder blades where, had he been an angel, he would have itched unbearably. I could eat you, she would say. I could eat you all up for my supper.

He no longer squirmed on her lap. He had lost his embarrassment with his milk teeth. He gazed up at her, older than his years, playing younger than his years. All of me? Even my nails?

She put them to her lips, one by one. Ten little fingers. Ten little toes. Every bit of you, she assured him. Even your nails.

His smile was furtive. He had only one smile and it was always furtive. My mother’s was the same. And mine too. No matter how much we meant to smile, no matter how little concealment we intended, we all betrayed some sneaking satisfaction, some minuscule and unworthy triumph, over and above. As though, like a well-treated slave or a pickpocket come into an inheritance, we had to take, even where we had been freely given. It was a gracelessness passed on down the family through the female line. A mark of our plebeian origins. Errand boy’s lip. Help meet’s mouth.

Only my father was free of it. The first and worst of architects, engineer of constructions whose uncouthness and deformity defy description almost as successfully as they defied decay, he at least possessed a smile — that’s when he smiled at all these days — that was harmonious. It went with what occasioned it. It went with what he felt. It went with himself.

He was lucky. It is not pretty to be disfigured by the one sign all men take to denote pleasure. And to my eye, Abel was never less pretty than when he was pleased.

My mother neither.

Rather than smile like that — rather than smile like us — it is better not to smile at all.

*

But let me tell you, if you can bear it, how she bathed him.

All right, let me tell you if I can bear it…

FIRST, smoking ashes packed around the scalloped rock wherein we washed, to take the chill, whether there was chill or not, out of the circumambient air.

SECOND, water drawn from a stream in a jar (or an amphora or a pitcher or a ewer or a gallipot or a jeroboam.) But drawn, not syphoned — educed, liberated, water delivered out of servitude.

THIRD, frangipani and jasmine and queen of the night and clove gillyflower crushed in a mortar and sprinkled into the pool. Lotus petals floating on the surface. And the wings of butterflies who had had their day and chose to expire here, so that their last memories should be their best, at this nightly festival to beauty.

FOURTH, Abel presented. Passive. Furtive. Hands held straight above his head for the removal of his shift. A pea podded.

FIFTH, exclamations instructional. Careful. Steady. Stand still. Keep straight. That’s it. Head up. There we are. Ah… there we are.

SIXTH, hands on. My mother folded, her haunches on her heels, her neck bulging like an eel, her hair streaming in the water like algae. Starting from Abel’s feet, in a slow repetitive circular motion, the first application of salts and soap.

SEVENTH, the ascent. Each blue-white shank traced, as if to corroborate a pattern in the memory. The scars on Abel’s knees (where he had knelt, unknowing and engrossed, on broken shell) anointed in a manner perfected while tending the flaky shoulders of angels.

EIGHTH, exhalations rhapsodical. Oh! Ah! There? There! How your skin trembles! How your blood pumps! Oh! Ah! So still on the outside, so much activity within. So red on the inside, so white without.

NINTH, no civility shown to my father, who arrives to mock a thing he hates. Still rubbing? Do you mean to rub the boy away? No civility shown. No answer given. Her eyes closed like curtains on all communication. But washing giving way to towelling, and the trance broken until the next night, unless…

Abel comes up so prettily under the friction, so startled-pink in all the dents and caverns of his body, that TENTH, my mother cannot refuse herself the indulgence — there, below his ear, or there, in the golden valley of his throat, or there and there, where she has pasted henna around his paps — of a kiss.

When this happens, the stifled smile on my brother’s lips, of shame and victory commingled, is impossible to bear. And

ELEVENTH, I turn my back on him, and on her, and repair to the garden I have been cultivating as an act of vengeance on myself, and plunge my arms elbow-deep into the soil, into the mud, into the slime, whether there is a moon to show me what horrors I may be touching, or whether there is not.

But I continue to watch over Abel in his sleep. I continue to plant my ear into his powdered chest and listen to his henna’d heart beat. My fear that something may happen to him, that he will simply stop living in the night, has not diminished. I still consider it my responsibility to guard against this eventuation, to monitor the evenness of his breathing, and there is no doubt in my mind that the engine for this vigilance is love.

A great protective passion for him overwhelms me when I see him sleeping. It is so strong that I am sometimes taken by the thought that it will be me whose heart goes. It will give out, or burst, with the exertions of worrying over his.