From a gold cigarette case she takes a cigarette, strikes a match, puffs. Her hand is stubby, broad, a peasant's hand. Yet the fingernails are clean and neatly buffed. Who is she? Only the light soul hangs in the air. It sounds like a quotation.
'Who knows what we truly believe,' says the woman. 'It is here, buried in our heart.' Lightly she smites her bosom. 'Buried even from ourselves. It is not belief that the boards are after. The effect is enough, the effect of belief. Show them you feel and they will be satisfied.'
'What do you mean, the boards?'
'The boards of examiners. We call them the boards. And we call ourselves the singing-birds. We sing for the boards, for their delight.'
'I do not give shows,' she says.'I'm not an entertainer.' The cigarette smoke drifts into her face; she waves it away. 'I cannot drum up what you call passion when it is not there. Cannot turn it on and off. If your boards will not understand that -' She shrugs. She had been about to say something about her ticket, about handing back her ticket. But that would be too grand, too literary, for so petty an occasion.
The woman stubs out her cigarette. 'I must go,' she says. 'I have purchases to make.'
Of what nature these purchases might be she does not say. But it strikes her, Elizabeth Costello {Here names fade away: well, her name is not fading away, not in the least), how passive she has become, how incurious. There are purchases she herself would like to make. Aside from the fantasy of the typewriter, she needs suncream, and soap of her own, not the harsh carbolic soap of the washroom. Yet she makes no move to enquire where in this place one does one's purchasing.
There is something else that strikes her. She has no appetite any more. From yesterday she has the faint after-memory of a lemon gelato and macaroons with coffee. Today the very thought of eating fills her with distaste. Her body feels unpleasantly heavy, unpleasantly corporeal.
Is a new career beginning to beckon: as one of the thin folk, the compulsive fasters, the hunger artists? Will her judges take pity if they see her waste away? She sees herself, a sticklike figure on a public bench in a patch of sunlight scribbling away at her task, a task never to be completed. God save me! she whispers to herself. Too literary, too literary! I must get out of here before I die!
The phrase comes back to her again at dusk, as she is taking a stroll along the town wall, watching the swallows swoop and dive above the square. A light soul. Is she a light soul? What is a light soul? She thinks of soap bubbles floating up among the swallows, rising even higher into the blue empyrean. Is that how the woman sees her, the woman whose job it is to scrub the floor and clean the lavatory (not that she ever sees her doing these things)? Certainly her life has not been a hard one, by most standards, but nor has it been easy. Quiet perhaps, protected perhaps: an antipodean life, removed from the worst of history; but driven too, the word is not too strong. Should she seek out the woman and set her right? Would the woman understand?
She sighs, walks on. How beautiful it is, this world, even if it is only a simulacrum! At least there is that to fall back on.
It is the same courtroom, with the same bailiff, but the panel of judges (the board, as she must now learn to call it) is new. There are seven of them, not nine, one of them a woman; she recognizes none of the faces. And the public benches are no longer empty. She has a spectator, a supporter: the cleaning woman, sitting by herself with a string bag on her lap.
'Elizabeth Costello, applicant, hearing number two,' intones the spokesman of today's board (the chief judge? the judge-in-chief?). 'You have a revised statement, we understand. Please proceed with it.'
She steps forward. 'What I believe,' she reads in a firm voice, like a child doing a recitation.'I was born in the city of Melbourne, but spent part of my childhood in rural Victoria, in a region of climatic extremes: of scorching droughts followed by torrential rains that swelled the rivers with the carcases of drowned animals. That, anyhow, is how I remember it.
'When the waters subsided – I am speaking of the waters of one river in particular now, the Dulgannon – acres of mud were left behind. At night you would hear the belling of tens of thousands of little frogs rejoicing in the largesse of the heavens. The air would be as dense with their calls as it was at noon with the rasping of cicadas.
'Where do they suddenly arrive from, these thousands of frogs? The answer is, they are always there. In the dry season they go underground, burrowing further and further from the heat of the sun until each has created a little tomb for itself. And in those tombs they die, so to speak. Their heartbeat slows, their breathing stops, they turn the colour of mud. Once again the nights are silent.
'Silent until the next rains come, rapping, as it were, on thousands of tiny coffin lids. In those coffins hearts begin to beat, limbs begin to twitch that for months have been lifeless. The dead awake. As the caked mud softens, the frogs begin to dig their way out, and soon their voices resound again in joyous exultation beneath the vault of the heavens.
'Excuse my language. I am or have been a professional writer. Usually I take care to conceal the extravagances of the imagination. But today, for this occasion, I thought I would conceal nothing, bare all. The vivifying flood, the chorus of joyous belling, followed by the subsiding of the waters and the retreat to the grave, then drought seemingly without end, then fresh rains and the resurrection of the dead – it is a story I present transparently without disguise.
'Why? Because today I am before you not as a writer but as an old woman who was once a child, telling you what I remember of the Dulgannon mudflats of my childhood and of the frogs who live there, some as small as the tip of my little finger, creatures so insignificant and so remote from your loftier concerns that you would not hear of them otherwise. In my account, for whose many failings I beg your pardon, the life cycle of the frog may sound allegorical, but to the frogs themselves it is no allegory, it is the thing itself, the only thing.
'What do I believe? I believe in those little frogs. Where I find myself today, in my old age and perhaps my older age, I am not sure. There are moments when it feels like Italy, but I could easily be mistaken, it could be a quite different place. Towns in Italy do not, as far as I know, have portals (I will not use the humble word gate in your presence) through which it is forbidden to pass. But the Australian continent, where I was born into the world, kicking and squalling, is real (if far away), the Dulgannon and its mudflats are real, the frogs are real. They exist whether or not I tell you about them, whether or not I believe in them.
'It is because of the indifference of those little frogs to my belief (all they want from life is a chance to gobble down mosquitoes and sing; and the males among them, the ones who do most of the singing, sing not to fill the night air with melody but as a form of courtship, for which they hope to be rewarded with orgasm, the frog variety of orgasm, again and again and again) – it is because of their indifference to me that I believe in them. And that is why, this afternoon, in this lamentably rushed and lamentably literary presentation for which I again apologize, but I thought I would offer myself to you without forethought, toute nue so to speak, and almost, as you can see for yourselves, without notes – that is why I speak to you of frogs. Of frogs and of my belief or beliefs and of the relation between the former and the latter. Because they exist.'
She comes to a stop. From behind her, the sound of gentle handclapping, from a single pair of hands, the cleaning woman's. The clapping dwindles, ceases. It was she, the cleaning woman, who put her up to it – this flood of words, this gabble, this confusion, this passion. Well, let us see what kind of response passion gets.
One of the judges, the man on the extreme right, leans forward. 'Dulgannon,' he says. 'That is a river?'
'Yes, a river. It exists. It is not negligible. You will find it on most maps.'
'And you spent your childhood there, on the Dulgannon?'
She is silent.
'Because it says nothing here, in your docket, about a childhood on the Dulgannon.'
She is silent.
'Is childhood on the Dulgannon another of your stories, Mrs Costello? Along with the frogs and the rain from heaven?'
'The river exists. The frogs exist. I exist. What more do you want?'
The woman among them, slim, with neat silver hair and silver-rimmed glasses, speaks. 'You believe in life?'
'I believe in what does not bother to believe in me.'
The judge makes a little gesture of impatience. 'A stone does not believe in you. A bush. But you choose to tell us not about stones or bushes but about frogs, to which you attribute a life story that is, as you concede, highly allegorical. These Australian frogs of yours embody the spirit of life, which is what you as a storyteller believe in.'
It is not a question, it is, in effect, a judgement. Should she accept it? She believed in life: will she take that as the last word on her, her epitaph? Her whole inclination is to protest: Vapid! she wants to cry. I am worth better than that! But she reins herself in. She is not here to win an argument, she is here to win a pass, a passage. Once she has passed, once she has said goodbye to this place, what she leaves behind of herself, even if it is to be an epitaph, will be of the utmost inconsequence.