“Yes,” I said, “I get what you mean.”
“But do you?” my father insisted. “But do you really, I wonder.” He examined me seriously, musing on the possibilities of my understanding him. “How old are you?”
“Twenty,” I said.
“I knew, of course,” he said. “Do you understand the significance of the nether regions?”
I sighed, a little too loudly, and my father narrowed his eyes. Quickly I said: “They are like everything else. They’re like the cities. The cities are deserts where people are alone and lonely. They don’t love one another.”
“Don’t love one another,” intoned my father, also sighing. “We no longer love one another. When we realize that we need one another we will stop disappearing. This is a lesson to us. A hard lesson, but, I hope, an effective one.”
My father continued to speak, but I watched him without listening. After a few minutes he stopped abruptly: “Are you listening to me?” he said. I was surprised to detect real concern in his voice. He looked at me questioningly. “I’ve always looked after you,” he said, “ever since you were little.”
12. The Cartographers’ Fall
I don’t know when it was that I noticed that my father had become depressed. It probably happened quite gradually without either my mother or me noticing it.
Even when I did become aware of it I attributed it to a woman. My father had a number of lovers and his moods usually reflected the success or failure of these relationships.
But I know now that he had heard already of Hurst and Jamov, the first two Cartographers to disappear. The news was suppressed for several weeks and then, somehow or other, leaked to the press. Certainly the Cartographers had enemies amongst the civil servants who regarded them as overproud and overpaid, and it was probably from one of these civil servants that the press heard the news.
When the news finally broke I understood my father’s depression and felt sorry for him.
I didn’t know how to help him. I wanted, badly, to make him happy. I had never ever been able to give him anything or do anything for him that he couldn’t do better himself. Now I wanted to help him, to show him I understood.
I found him sitting in front of the television one night when I returned from my office and I sat quietly beside him. He seemed more kindly now and he placed his hand on my knee and patted it.
I sat there for a while, overcome with the new warmth of this relationship, and then, unable to contain my emotion any more, I blurted out: “You could change your job.”
My father stiffened and sat bolt upright. The pressure of his hand on my knee increased until I yelped with pain, and still he held on, hurting me terribly.
“You are a fool,” he said, “you wouldn’t know if you were up yourself.”
Through the pain in my leg, I felt the intensity of my father’s fear.
13. Why the World Needs Cartographers
My father woke me at 3.00 a.m. to tell me why the world needed Cartographers. He smelled of whisky and seemed, once again, to be very gentle.
“The world needs Cartographers,” he said softly, “because if they didn’t have Cartographers the fools wouldn’t know where they were. They wouldn’t know if they were up themselves if they didn’t have a Cartographer to tell them what’s happening. The world needs Cartographers,” my father said, “it fucking well needs Cartographers.”
14. One Final Scene
Let me describe a final scene to you: I am sitting on the sofa my father brought home when I was five years old. I am watching television. My father is sitting in a leather armchair that once belonged to his father and which has always been exclusively his. My mother is sitting in the dining alcove with her cards spread across the table, playing one more interminable game of patience.
I glance casually across at my father to see if he is doing anything more than stare into space, and notice, with a terrible shock, that he is showing the first signs of dematerializing.
“What are you staring at?” My father, in fact, has been staring at me.
“Nothing.”
“Well, don’t.”
Nervously I return my eyes to the inanity of the television. I don’t know what to do. Should I tell my father that he is dematerializing? If I don’t tell him will he notice? I feel I should do something but I can feel, already, the anger in his voice. His anger is nothing new. But this is possibly the beginning of a tide of uncontrollable rage. If he knows he is dematerializing, he will think I don’t love him. He will blame me. He will attack me. Old as he is, he is still considerably stronger than I am and he could hurt me badly. I stare determinedly at the television and feel my father’s eyes on me.
I try to feel love for my father, I try very, very hard.
I attempt to remember how I felt about him when I was little, in the days when he was still occasionally tender towards me.
But it’s no good.
Because I can only remember how he has hit me, hurt me, humiliated me and flirted with my girlfriends. I realize, with a flush of panic and guilt, that I don’t love him. In spite of which I say: “I love you.”
My mother looks up sharply from her cards and lets out a surprised cry.
I turn to my father. He has almost disappeared. I can see the leather of the chair through his stomach.
I don’t know whether it is my unconvincing declaration of love or my mother’s exclamation that makes my father laugh. For whatever reason, he begins to laugh uncontrollably: “You bloody fools,” he gasps, “I wish you could see the looks on your bloody silly faces.”
And then he is gone.
My mother looks across at me nervously, a card still in her hand. “Do you love me?” she asks.
The Last Days of a Famous Mime
1.
The Mime arrived on Alitalia with very little luggage: a brown paper parcel and what looked like a woman’s handbag.
Asked the contents of the brown paper parcel he said, “String.”
Asked what the string was for he replied: “Tying up bigger parcels.”
It had not been intended as a joke, but the Mime was pleased when the reporters laughed. Inducing laughter was not his forte. He was famous for terror.
Although his state of despair was famous throughout Europe, few guessed at his hope for the future. “The string,” he explained, “is a prayer that I am always praying.”
Reluctantly he untied his parcel and showed them the string. It was blue and when extended measured exactly fifty-three metres.
The Mime and the string appeared on the front pages of the evening papers.
2.
The first audiences panicked easily. They had not been prepared for his ability to mime terror. They fled their seats continually. Only to return again.
Like snorkel divers they appeared at the doors outside the concert hall with red faces and were puzzled to find the world as they had left it.
3.
Books had been written about him. He was the subject of an award-winning film. But in his first morning in a provincial town he was distressed to find that his performance had not been liked by the one newspaper’s one critic.