However, all in all, what I liked most was to go and sit for an hour in the cemetery. On mid-week afternoons you felt a dreamlike solitude there. The fog swirled and wet your face. The tall, bare trees went in and out of the fog like walking shadows. In the haze at three o’clock I often saw the fuzzy glow from a house light. Sometimes a teasing, gentle drizzle kept you afloat mid-air, like a levitating body. The grass and mud together created a deep absinthe color. I have been in few places that so favored a blissful state of suspension or contemplation as Meanwood’s inhospitable cemetery. It transported me elsewhere so easily and allowed me to make such slow-motion somersaults!
The weather then deteriorated so dreadfully I became quite averse to going out. I read several long stories, in particular the Bible that I hadn’t picked up in a long time. For a while I was delighted by the illusion that I had crystal-clear ideas about men and women, about the world and the objects in it. But human cruelty is, in effect, exhausting, because truth creates a situation from which there is no way out or future. That was when I decided to alternate reading with a disinterested contemplation of the outside world. I did it from my window. The local sparrows made a pleasant impression, though I soon realized that only one thing is worse than a sparrow and that is: another sparrow. These birds fight each other to the death and are insatiably voracious when vying with their peers. Nothing could be more disheartening than the sight of the effort a bird must make to quietly eat that crumb or meaty beetle it has won after huge travail or a battle with another sparrow. Because sparrows fight tooth and nail over a beetle, a crumb, or fresh air and alternate violence with the most joyfully rude lovemaking. I had no choice but to turn a blind eye and, in the end, desisted completely.
That was my stay in Meanwood, a suburb of Leeds. They were months when I didn’t see the sun — or long for the sun — immersed in a silence of rain, snow, and fog, darkened at times by winds and storms, charmed at others by tranquil chiming bells, far from the madding crowd and horrified to think that my return to it was inevitable. I had all I needed: a plate of roast beef and vegetables, a handful of random books, a drop of alcohol, and the Manchester Guardian. As I have roamed discretely, I am an expert when it comes to bidding farewell, but when it was time to depart that land of shadows I found it hard to keep back my tears.
To give you an idea of the atmosphere in Meanwood, in winter, and of signs that its atmosphere could become thicker and thicker, I will relate how one afternoon, when I was in the cemetery, that is, by the way, a place of transit, and had been sitting on a bench for some time, I suddenly noticed that a man was sitting next to me and staring at me, though nothing had alerted me to his presence. I almost shouted out in terror. He saw that and I heard him mutter enigmatically. Then he smiled drily, I reacted contemptuously and looked the other way. I retreated as ostentatiously and obviously as I could to the far end of the bench, increasingly intrigued by the man who’d sat down next to me without my realizing. My eyes were wide open, that’s for sure. Moreover, it wasn’t reading weather and I don’t remember anything nearby that might have distracted me to the extent that I didn’t see what was happening. It wasn’t too foggy either: it was merely blue and hazy. When I gave him another look, I was shocked by his strange appearance. He was a tall, thin man with sunken cheeks, though his complexion was certainly fresh, his cheeks smoothly shaven, and below that his bushy beard curled up under a skull as small as a bird’s, covered with blondish hair and a bald patch above the nape of his neck. I could see all that because he wasn’t wearing a hat or a cap even though the weather was so miserable. His ears were on the large side and his nose was a big schnozzle. Thick, misty glasses rested on this protuberance, from behind which two bright eyes squinted out. He was smoking a cigarette and when he exhaled he exercised every single jaw muscle and his beard almost touched the end of his nose. Despite his eccentric appearance, it was impossible not to see that his face looked bemused, as if his curiosity had been slightly aroused. I wasn’t able to look at him for long, because the second he’d finished his smoke he stood up, straightened his glasses on his nose by stretching, and then shortening his arms and flounced slowly away rather effeminately, moving his back as if he had an attack of the shivers. As he got to his feet, I glimpsed the way he was dressed and was more astonished than ever: he wore a winged collar and white bow tie, a much-darned, red-polka-dotted shirt, and the turn-ups of baggy black pants hung out beneath his shabby white raincoat. His lower extremities were encased in split, mud-spattered shoes.
But perhaps the fact I couldn’t guess his age was most intrigued me about that fantastic individuaclass="underline" you could have taken him for an old man who’d been artificially rejuvenated or for a decrepit youth and he could have easily been one or the other. I wondered if he might not be a professional simpleton. True enough, one finds real simpletons in English cities, but they exist outside as well. When walking through fields, you sometimes come across strange people who seem to be sleepwalking and look as if they don’t belong to this world. Whatever the weather you can watch them stroll slowly by, in a trance as if something mysterious had surprised them, or they were being forced to follow the path of a wandering cloud. I’d like to think that these eccentric characters were some sort of actor in the drama of that swirling haze, a kind of pilgrim intoxicated by the vast void of fog. Generally speaking, however, they are contemplative folk with notorious reputations or harmless fools and, they do say, you can even find the odd sarcastic comedian in their ranks.
I can’t find the words to describe how strange I felt when that very same afternoon when I was opening the front door, I saw the man I had encountered in the cemetery leaving a neighboring house. I even thought that he smiled at me from a distance making an o with his open mouth and stiffening his thin, rubbery lips. I couldn’t wait to mention the fact to the lady of the house, who rattled off a long explanation that unfortunately I can’t reproduce here in as much detail as I’d like.
“The house next door,” she told me, “stood empty for months and you can imagine how surprised we were when we saw tenants arriving. The new tenants were this gentleman who has aroused your curiosity and a very old lady, who, they say, is almost eighty. This lady is the widow of a former dance teacher who ran an academy in London up to a few months before his death that occurred twenty-five years ago. Her husband left her a small sum and she has eked out a wretched existence on that up to now. According to what people say, she’s an extraordinary individuaclass="underline" despite her age and though she’s been bedridden for three years, she maintains all her faculties as if she was a young girl, remembers everything and converses fluently. Besides that, she has a huge appetite and eats plenty of everything. Between you and me, her stomach often crops up in conversations when the latter turn to the subject of stomachs. To be perfectly frank, the household has few friends: both of them are Irish Papists and that leaves them rather isolated. We don’t have anything to do with them, but not for those reasons. We’ve decided that the best way to keep on friendly terms with one’s neighbors is to let them be, and that’s why there’s been hardly contact between them and us. He is Thomas O’Grady, and we call him Mr Tom. Tom is the old lady’s servant and he runs the house all on his tod: cooking, washing, dusting, and pastry-making, he does the shopping, waits on the lady, bathes her, irons, mends and patches. In a word, he does all that’s to be done if a home is to be called a home. I’ve heard that he’s polite and serious even though he does have his fads, In the early days after they moved in everyone stared at him as if he was peculiar and children laughed in his face. He’s the sad kind. He’s got a nasty, girlish voice. When he speaks, he gestures with his hands and makes pretentious, effeminate faces. He’s the kind that grabs things with his fingertips while rolling his eyes. He’s mad about music and one of these days you’ll hear him croon some Italian ballad with that nasal voice of his. Pathetic and silly … I’ve heard he’s from a good Irish family, but is one who was born to be unhappy. He is a watchmaker by profession; by the time he’d served his apprenticeship, he’d become myopic and couldn’t work at it. He’s lived any old how in different parts of England and perhaps he can only do what he is actually doing. Nonetheless if he wasn’t Irish or so queer, he would find work as a servant in a good household. Now everyone shuts their door in his face and the old dear gives him four shillings a week. He must be in his thirties. He’s a pitiful fellow.”