Читать книгу Life in the West - Brian Aldiss - Страница 12

Ermalpa, September 1978

Darkness had fallen. The first-floor corridor of the Grand Hotel Marittimo was littered with silver trays, lying forlorn with a mess of coffee-pots, used cups, and tousled napkins. As Thomas Squire left Room 143, a guest was in another room playing a violin behind locked doors.

After a half-an-hour suspended in sarvangasana, followed by a cold shower, Squire was feeling alert and ready for the evening. Downstairs, before turning into the bar, he took a stroll in the busy street. One of the Canadian delegates, seeing him walk towards the swing doors, said, in honest horror, ‘You’re not going out alone in Ermalpa after dark, Mr Squire? You know this place is the headquarters of the Mafia?’

Surviving a turn in the muggy air, Squire went to fulfil his seven o’clock appointment in the bar.

Selina Ajdini was there already. Several young Italians were talking to her, pressing round her armchair. She had changed her clothes, and now wore an ankle-length white jersey dress with long sleeves and edged with gold braid, its only decoration being a criss-cross pattern of braid with loose tassels which covered the bosom. Several thin gold bracelets hung at her slender right wrist, three rings glittered on her rather cruel-looking fingers. Her neat black hair, gathered into a thick tail, hung asymmetrically to one shoulder. She still carried her bulky bag.

The bar was full of the cheerful noises characteristic of a popular time. Three barmen in smart uniforms moved freely behind their gilded pallisades, smiling, exchanging jokes with each other and their customers as they worked; glass chinked against glass; the cash register whirred; wallpaper music played softly in the background; a waitress bustled among the customers, collecting glasses; and a murmur of many languages grew from all sides. A female voice called Squire’s name.

He turned and there was a small dark Italian lady he had watched earlier in the day. She was an efficient messenger for Frenza, the conference secretary, and spoke a little English. She had a minor administrative detail to sort out with Squire and, as she talked, he realized that she was Frenza’s wife; her well-turned ankles and heavy gold hair were immediately recognizable. Her name was Maria. She wore a neat black dress, had one bracelet on her wrist and two rings on her fingers. The smile she gave him was tired.

When they had settled the matter, he moved towards the bar. Ajdini had dismissed her retinue and sat smoking through a long holder, awaiting him. Although the bitter herb of her Huxley speech still flavoured his memory, he could not help smiling as he joined her, sinking into an armchair facing her.

The eroded bone was softened in artificial light. She said, ‘These Italians are so sociable, that we would talk with less disturbance in one of the rooms off the foyer. I have spoken about it to one of the barmen, who is very kind, and he will serve us with drinks as long as we are there.’

‘Very well.’

‘Let’s go, then.’

The room she referred to led off the passage where the case of silk ties stood. It was small, containing by way of ornament only a large marble bust of a general, whose remarkable cranial development alone was worth commemoration. Some earlier occupant of the room, perhaps idly waiting a tryst, had pencilled in the general’s pupils, making him appear cross-eyed.

‘This is a privilege for me,’ she said, lightly arranging the white dress as they sat down. ‘I suppose that any university in the capitalist world – and not only there – would be delighted to be able to address you face to face, Mr Squire. Your television series, and the book, which is a delight in its own right, does for the culture of today what Lord Clark’s Civilization did for the past.’

‘The series was the work of a team. They made it work – Grahame Ash, the director, in particular. Ash is a genius. He has a way with people and he thinks in pictures.’

‘Your work in general. Since the Hyde Park Expo – and before. What you do enables the various artists of today, and those who would not presume or care to call themselves artists, to go ahead with more confidence, as one always can when one sees oneself working within some kind of a tradition. You generously defined a revolutionary tradition. However, I must not embarrass you, a modest Englishman, with my praises, although I am aware they can have no significance for you.’

‘That is a mistaken assumption. I am delighted to have your good opinion. You have a higher opinion of the series than some critics. What man does not desire the good opinion of an attractive woman?’

She smiled, and the bangles rattled as she stretched out a hand. ‘Nor will I ask you if you are finding enjoyment in your world-wide success, since you must surely have become tired of such a question. Do you mind if I smoke?’

She was more striking than pretty, with a sharpness about her features which suggested wary intelligence. The sharpness, a quickness in her movements, a fleck of green in her irises, suggested wolf to Squire. He admired wolves; wolves were good to each other.

Her hair moved about her cheeks as she reached into the clumsy leather bag and brought out her cigarettes. He noticed immediately, with surprise, that they were Yugoslav, ‘Drina’ brand. He knew the name.

Whilst he was leaning forward to give her a light, the friendly waiter arrived. He cast an envious and distinctly unfriendly look at Squire. Squire stood his gold lighter on the table as he ordered drinks. After the waiter had left, dismissed by a brilliant smile from Ajdini, she picked up the lighter and inspected it as it lay in her narrow palm before pressing it into Squire’s hand.

‘What I respond to personally in your work is your humanity. It gives your criticism what the rest of us lack, a creative depth. No, I’m not praising now, merely stating. To prove it, let me be a little critical, if you will permit, and say that I find the humanity the more impressive since you do come, do you not, from a deeply privileged background?’

He regarded her through her protective cloud of smoke, admiring her breasts and thinking of the benefits her beauty must bring her, unasked.

‘Almost anyone, in North America or Western Europe, must admit to a privileged background.’ Seeing her expression, he added, ‘And that is not intended as an evasion of your question. We must use that privileged background to carry not only our materialism but our liberalism and awareness to the rest of the world. We must hope that ultimately those values will prevail.’

‘Liberalism doesn’t carry much priority, even in universities.’

‘No, or in an ant heap. But we have to resist the idea of the world as ant heap.’ He could catch the distinctive smell of Balkan tobacco.

‘Well, I know what you mean, but only people from backgrounds of privilege can afford the luxury of fine sentiments. Your series, when all’s done, was admirable as display …’

He laughed. ‘Display? Give me credit for keeping my politics out of it.’

She looked down at the table, sharply up at him, down again. ‘I found it loaded with politics.’

Music was playing, perhaps in the room overhead. The atmosphere of the room was oppressive; having the general listening stonily to all that was said did not increase comfort.

‘I don’t see any worth in a world in which individuality has been lost or relinquished,’ he said. ‘On an evolutionary scale, mankind strove for many generations to become a conscious individual being, instead of a unit in a tribe or a herd or an ant heap. In our generation – or generations, I should say, since there is a considerable difference in our ages – we have seen a menacing move in the opposite direction, and individualism crushed by the power of the state.’ In fact, there probably was not more than eight years between them.

‘In a world threatened by fascism, where parliamentary democracy has failed, the state must protect the individual, and the individual submits for his own good.’

‘Perhaps you mistake the implications of what I say. I would deny that parliamentary democracy, for all its faults, has failed; being a consensus, it offers its citizens a freer life than the despotisms of either Left or Right. Nor is the world threatened by fascism; individual countries, perhaps. But fascism is always a ramshackle thing which cannot perpetuate itself, whereas the great communist bureaucracies prove to have longer life.

‘However, the point I was trying to make goes beyond politics, to forces moving through our evolutionary lives, if I may use that phrase. Evolution still shapes us. Compare Islam and Christianity with the conceptually primitive Aztec religion, where mass-salvation could be achieved by mass-sacrifice. Souls were interchangeable. The Old Testament is a drama of man becoming aware that souls are no longer interchangeable.’

She smiled. ‘You speak of the soul, whatever that may be. Yet you are not a religious man?’

‘We are all religious. In our day, the Left has all the dialectic, the Right none. Yet lying to hand is the supreme argument that souls are not interchangeable. It is perhaps too universal a truth for the Right to use, too true a truth to fall to the service of any party. Nevertheless it is the vital factor through which the present world struggles towards the future, whether capitalist or communist, Caucasian, Negroid, or Mongoloid. It’s our one hope, because undeniable.’

They paused as the waiter brought in their drinks, a cinzano for Ajdini, a vodka for Squire, on a silver tray also bearing two bowls of nuts and olives. The waiter slid the bill to Squire as if performing a conjuring trick.

‘I find yours an elitist argument,’ Ajdini said. ‘Naturally, evolution has no party. People are too busy trying just to live, to survive, to worry over evolution. Who can worry over evolution? Surely you don’t?’

‘Well, “elitist” is just a worn-out Marxist term of abuse, isn’t it? Designed to banish thought. I’m trying to establish some sort of historical perspective.’

‘Historical perspective is itself a luxury. People with empty bellies care nothing for yesterday or tomorrow.’

He sighed and raised his glass to her, without sipping, lowering it again to say, ‘We are not people with empty bellies, you and I, so we must cultivate those perspectives. Don’t try to bludgeon me with fake compassion for the starving. You call my background “deeply privileged”; I see it as carrying deep responsibilities – responsibilities for civilized enjoyment as well as duties. Yes, I have good fortune. That is because I have spent most of my life maintaining those values I live for.’ He made a dismissive gesture. ‘I do not expect you to accept those values as worth maintaining; perhaps you would rather destroy them, since they are those shared by many in my social stratum – among them, during his lifetime, Aldous Huxley.’

He had made his point. Now he drank.

Looking down at her hand resting on the table, she said, ‘You evidently did not care for my paper this afternoon.’

Making a slight effort, he said, ‘We’re off duty now.’

She put fingers to her delicate lips and said, ‘I see you do not want to argue. I wonder why that is?’

‘I see you want to argue.’

As they both chewed olives, she said, ‘However beastly you may find my politics, I am not a dedicated Women’s Libber. Not exactly.’

He said nothing to that, having learnt that either approval or disapproval of such statements provoked argument.

After a short silence, she said, ‘Before I was into stylistics, I worked in neurosurgery in Los Angeles. That was when I was fresh out of college, apart from a trip to Mexico, where I saw for myself the poverty and injustice suffered there under American imperialism.’

She went on, and he continued to look at her, but her words no longer penetrated to his senses. He thought about her being a neurosurgeon, and saw her character differently, regarded her not just as a woman parroting ideology, but as someone vulnerable and dedicated. About her remarkable face, the sharp planes cutting back from her nose, there was something of the scalpel; but he detected a sensitivity previously hidden from him, perhaps a sensitivity to things to which he remained blind. Her priggish phrase about Mexicans suffering under American imperialism represented some genuine experience of pain and distancing which she could interpret only in terms of political theory.

She was saying, ‘Perhaps you know the name of Montrose Wilder. He was very distinguished in his field. It was a privilege to work with him. A good surgeon. Also a good man.

‘When I began as a trainee under him, he had a patient aged about forty, who had been involved in a shooting accident and was suffering from a parietal lesion of the brain. Her name was Dorothy, and she was severely dysphasic.

‘Montrose stimulated her hippocampus with an electrode. Dorothy suddenly cried out. She told us that she saw her mother in an orange dress – she relived that forgotten time – her mother in an orange dress walked down a hillside towards her, carrying a basket full of apples. The mother was smiling and happy.

‘Afterwards, Dorothy cried a lot. Her mother had died when she was five, and she had lost all conscious memory of her. The electrode had allowed her to relive that fragment of life when she was an infant, untouched by trouble. She was grateful. The memory was a gift from a happier world. A land of lost content …’

She looked down at her hands. ‘I think I can see now, as I’m telling it to you, that Dorothy perceived a linkage between the mother’s death when she was five and the attempt of a drunken and jealous lover to murder her at the age of forty. All succeeding messes flowed from that first mess …’ She bit her lip.

He said something sympathetic. Ajdini ignored him, lighting another ‘Drina’ and gazing up into the recesses of the room.

‘I thought of Dorothy when you spoke about souls. If you have looked into living brains, seen the vulnerable exposed hemispheres, you think ever after in terms of electrical impulses, not of souls.’

‘Supposing you look more deeply and see both physiological apparatus and electrical impulses as God’s handiwork?’

‘Do you do that?’

He laughed. ‘No. But I wish I could. I am in the anomalous position of believing in souls yet not in God.’

‘So art’s a comfort, eh?’ She was smiling. ‘Not that we don’t need comforting.’

‘Art’s many things, isn’t it? A comfort for me, a source of argument for you?’

A warmth in her smile, as she responded to his teasing, touched something inside him. ‘In the face of such large questions, really art in the twentieth century has little to say. After Kafka – nothing worth having. The Theatre of the Absurd.’

She indicated the bust which impersonally supervised their conversation. ‘Do you think this cross-eyed general is elevated to the Absurd? Just a few pencil lines make a difference.’

‘They do to any of us.’

‘Will you have dinner with me, please? If I promise not to convert you to Marxism.’

‘I’d love to, but I have to go out.’ Looking at his watch, he added, ‘Now.’

He noted her immediate curiosity, and added, ‘I have an appointment. Perhaps tomorrow evening.’

‘Are you going to a brothel? I hear there are plenty in Ermalpa. Because of the poverty.’

Laughing, he said, ‘No, nothing like that.’

‘Oh, don’t be all English and bashful. If you are going, can I come with you? I won’t spoil your enjoyment, but I’d like to talk to the women.’

‘Die Spitze might like that but I wouldn’t. I’m not in the habit of taking ladies to brothels. For one thing, it’s too much like taking coals to Newcastle …’