Europe does not have a monopoly on crime and violence. There are plenty of both in the United States, they proliferate throughout the world. President Kennedy is assassinated, the war drags on in Vietnam, riots break out in the black neighbourhoods of most of the country’s big cities, Martin Luther King in turn is shot dead by a fanatic. At the same time counter-currents build up, against a background of tumultuous music carrying forward a determined passion to live differently, to emerge from the ghettos, the quagmire of wars, the stifling oppression of a circumscribed and petty day-to-day existence. May throws herself into all these currents. Wherever things are stirring and a prospect of change is to be detected, wherever the pulse of the age quickens, she is there. ‘I have a dream,’ Martin Luther King repeated psalmodically a few years before he was killed. May picks up this interrupted dream and runs with it.
She has always tried to defy gravity and allow dreams to enter reality. This gained her at the age of fifteen the enduring resentment of her mother, Nora. Her parents had not been on good terms with each other for years, and her father, Lajos, had a relationship with another woman, Judith Evans, who was a friend of the family. Everyone knew but they all pretended not to know, for the sake of appearances. One day her father fell ill. Nora felt more satisfaction than anxiety at this sudden illness: her husband would be unable to see his mistress as long as he was confined to his bed. When his illness worsened, it would have been preferable for Lajos to go into hospital, but Nora opposed this, arguing he was better off at home with his family, and she demonstrated great devotion in looking after her ‘poor husband’. A genuine but fierce devotion, for though she was very zealous in caring for him, she was even more zealous in keeping him isolated. Even their daughter was only rarely allowed to go into the bedroom where her father was resting, and was not to be tired.
Her father was not resting, he was dying a slow death. And in his long agony he asked to see Judith. He begged. Nora gently wiped his face, gave him a drink, stroked his hand, merely repeating in a voice full of solicitude, ‘Don’t talk, Lajos, lie quietly, I’m taking care of you, everything’s fine …’ And when, towards the end, he breathed in a whisper Judith’s name, wanting to shout it, she responded ingenuously, ‘I’m here, my darling.’
Judith Evans had called round twice, with the excuse of making a friendly visit to get news of the invalid. Nora received her with implacable politeness, imposing on her the torture of being served tea, when every gesture, every look, were considered and calculated, and a conversation whose every phrase consisted of sickeningly bland stupid clichés punctuated with acerbic silences. Unaware of the seriousness of his condition, during her first visit Judith had hoped to see Lajos, that he would come down from his room. Sensing this desire in the woman she hated and finally held in her power, Nora dashed this expectation with a few words: ‘It’s impossible, he’s asleep and doesn’t want to be disturbed by anybody.’ The second time, Judith dared to express her desire. ‘I’d like to see him …’ Nora slowly drank a sip of tea, daintily set down her cup. Judith’s thudding, racing heartbeat could be heard in the silence of the drawing room. And with a sorrowful gracious smile the lady of the house delivered her blow: ‘It’s too late now. He doesn’t recognize anyone. Thank you for your visit.’ And she rose, adding with unfailing graciousness, ‘I’ll see you to the door.’ Judith rose in turn, ghastly pale, her lips trembling. It was then that May, who witnessed this scene, intervened. ‘Come,’ she said, taking Judith Evans by the hand. And before her mother had time to react, she had rushed Judith out of the room, locking the door behind her, led her upstairs, and taken into her father’s bedroom the woman he loved.
‘I have a dream.’ Dreams are meant to become part of reality, forcing their way in with violence if necessary. They are meant to re-infuse it with energy, light, freshness, when it gets mired in mediocrity, ugliness and stupidity. The heartbeats of a woman stricken with the panic of love had released in May the will for total independence, as well as unfailing reserves of pluck.
Sequence
One day the South will recognize its real heroes … They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy-two-year-old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: ‘My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest.’
Martin Luther King
Letter from Birmingham Jail, 16 April 1963
You cannot understand
you who have not listened
to the heartbeat
of a man about to die.
Charlotte Delbo, ‘Useless Knowledge’
Fragment 15
It is not just History with a capital H that repeats itself, so does family history. In both cases the repetition is spiced with nuances, with slight variations, tempering the effect of a rehash.
The illness that twenty-five years earlier had carried off her father in less than a month strikes May down at the same age and progresses just as swiftly. Within a few days it drains her of strength, confines her to bed, and constricts her breathing, reducing her to complete helplessness. Magnus never leaves her bedside, Terence though nearby keeps out of the way. But when May senses the countdown to her death is no longer to be measured in days but hours, she asks Magnus to leave the room and to call Terence.
She tells Terence to close the door, then to come and lie in the bed beside her. It is in his arms, close to his body, a body she has never stripped naked, never embraced or caressed, that she wants to die. Only the tenderness and silence of the body of a man impervious to desire for her, that of her fraternal spouse, her sibling soul, can help her to resign herself, to pass on without fear or anger through death into the unknown. Close to the body of her lover this would be beyond her, she would feel too much rebellion and pain. And she wants to be capable of accepting the inevitable, to meet it in single combat. She wants to succeed in doing honour to her death.
Terence lies by her side, gently folds her in his arms. With their faces touching, their eyes are so close their lashes brush against each other’s and their gaze is indivisible. They cannot see anything, all they perceive is a quivering glimmer like a little pool of sunshine at the heart of a bush. This amuses them. May has not enough strength to laugh any more, she smiles. And their smiles also mingle, and their breath. They do not speak, having nothing more to say to each other, or too much to say, at this moment it is all one. And they feel content, curled up together like that, out of time, free of desire, in the starkness of love. Their closeness has never been so intense, immense, and luminous. They are in a state of absolute trust, total self-surrender to the other, total forgetfulness of self in wonderment. Never have they felt so much a presence to each other, a presence in the world — but only on the outer edge, no longer in the thick of it.
Terence sees the little pool of light that quivered as the tips of his eyelashes grow dim, he hears the breath that whispered in unison with his own fall silent. Yet he does not move, he simply holds May’s face in his hands and remains there for a long time, a long time in the now infinite silence of love.
May has done honour to her death.
Magnus is waiting outside the bedroom, not expecting to be let back in. A great emptiness opens up inside him as the hours pass. His mind is blank, he feels nothing but a wave of peculiar coldness travelling through his body. He is neither patient nor impatient, he is simply there, like a tightrope walker pausing in the middle of his tightrope stretched above a desert. He has to remain very still to retain his equilibrium.